The sight on Monday in Rome of Donatella Versace, Anna Wintour and Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, wasn’t the result of a random powerful person generator. Instead, it was a photocall for this week’s preview of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s forthcoming exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, which will feature ecclesiastical items with designs by labels including Lanvin and Chanel, to demonstrate the influence of Catholicism on fashion. Going from the sacred to the profane might sound like an uneasy aesthetic shift, but there is a long history of items worn by those in the pulpit being reworked for those in the congregation. Cristóbal Balenciaga was famously influenced by the robes worn by priests, while Italian designers ranging from Dolce & Gabbana to Antonio Berardi have referenced Roman Catholic tropes. Before the Met’s exhibition opens in May, here are five moments where fashion and Catholicism became a holy alliance.
Alexander McQueen, Joan, 1998
Alexander McQueen, it’s fair to say, was attracted to the dramatic side of life – so the Catholic church was always going to be his thing. For his autumn/winter 1998 show, he took Joan of Arc – the Catholic martyr – as inspiration. The show involved chain mail, cardinal-style jackets and ended with a model in a ring of fire.
Jean Paul Gaultier couture, 2007
The inventor of Madonna’s conical bra and wearer of kilts on late-night TV, Jean-Paul Gaultier is a designer who loves to play with tradition. In 2007, the Catholic church was in focus in his couture collection, which had models wearing halos, sacred hearts and dresses that looked like stained glass. Some models were walking religious icons, with gold headdresses, while there were several in the Virgin Mary’s blue.
Nicki Minaj with ‘pope’ at the Grammys, 2012
Before 2018’s white roses, the Grammys red carpet was an anything-goes space. Into that, in 2012, came Nicki Minaj, dressed in a red Versace robe, with a “pope” as her escort, providing divine assistance for Minaj to slay the other red-carpet competition – arguably a hard ask during a year in which other attendees included Katy Perry, with blue hair to match her dress, and a woman with a Terminator-style arm.
Dolce & Gabbana, AW18
The Italian fashion duo have often referred to the look of Catholicism, with Dolce’s Sicilian childhood a particular source of inspiration. Their most recent show might have been most notable for the handbag-wielding drones, but the clothes once again explored the more traditional world of the Catholic church: models wore papal purple, jackets with ornate crucifixes and cardinal’s robes.
The Prada Pope, 2005-2013
Pope Benedict XVI was a sartorial gamechanger, bringing back ornate robes to the Papal wardrobe. A snap of his red shoes that resembled slip-ons designed by Prada went around the internet in 2007, and he was nicknamed the “Prada Pope”. It later emerged that the shoes were, in fact, designed by his personal cobbler Adriano Stefanelli, allowing the Vatican to issue possibly the most alpha correction ever: “The pope is not dressed by Prada but by Christ.”
