01-08-2025
Sacred threads: Why fashion designers can't stop imitating Catholicism - ABC Religion & Ethics
When forty churchmen in red cassocks and sunglasses lined the Ponte Sant'Angelo in Rome to flank the runway of Dolce & Gabbana's Alta Sartoria show, it felt like a cultural moment too surreal to be scripted. Beneath the looming Castel Sant'Angelo, once a papal fortress, models processed in bejewelled tunics, brocaded cassocks and mitre-inspired tabards. To call it theatrical would be an understatement — it was liturgical spectacle, reimagined for Instagram.
And this wasn't just a one-off. From the Vatican-inspired looks at the 2018 Met Gala — titled Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination — to Chinese couturier Guo Pei's reliquary-themed gowns and Rihanna's unforgettable turn in a mitre, Catholic vestments have become a source-book for high fashion. But what does it mean when devotion becomes design? Can beauty, luxurious, excessive, sensuous beauty bridge the divide between the sacred and the secular?
Rihanna attends the 'Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination' gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 7 May 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur / MG18 / Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Is it simply appropriation? A cynical recycling of sacred signs for visual drama, divorced from belief? Or is it a homage, a kind of cultural veneration of forms that still resonate with meaning even in an increasingly secular age?
Dolce & Gabbana themselves have long walked this path. Their 2022 Alta Moda line featured cherubs, crucifixes and cathedral embroidery; their Fall 2013 collection drew on Byzantine mosaics of the Madonna. In 2025, they took it even further. Alta Sartoria in Rome was not only an ode to ecclesiastical tailoring, it was Catholic iconography elevated to high art and turned into luxury commerce.
Reaction, as always, was divided. Don Alberto Rocca, a Milanese priest and adviser to the designers, praised the show's sincerity: 'It's not mocking, it's about the spirit', he said. 'Otherwise, I would not be here.' Another priest, Fr Alberto Ravagnani, took to Instagram to defend the use of vestment aesthetics as a way of 'restoring lustre' to religious heritage. Yet others were less convinced. A theology student condemned the spectacle as a 'usurpation' of liturgical meaning for profit and entertainment. Catholic social media lit up with accusations of blasphemy, vulgarity and desecration.
Why does this topic provoke such intensity? Perhaps because Catholic vestments are not just old clothes. They are visible theology. The stole draped across the shoulders signifies priestly authority; the chasuble speaks of charity covering all. Colours shift with the liturgical calendar: purple for penitence, white for resurrection, red for martyrdom and Holy Spirit. To translate these garments into runway fashion is to walk a fine line between symbolic power and aesthetic detachment.
Priests' liturgical vestments. (Photo by John Greim / LightRocket via Getty Images)
But fashion, too, traffics in signs. It plays with identity, status, reverence and rebellion. The power of a Catholic-inspired fashion piece lies in its layered ambiguity. Is it ironic? Reverent? Transgressive? Beautiful? Or simply lucrative? When Rihanna walked the Met Gala carpet in 2018 in a headgear resembling a mitre and silver-beaded robe by Maison Margiela, was she making a joke, a statement of cultural possession, or a tribute to aesthetic grandeur?
What seems clear is that Catholicism offers fashion something rare in our visual culture: a unified iconography that is both immediately recognisable and endlessly rich. Unlike minimalist Protestant spaces or austere Zen aesthetics, Catholic visual tradition revels in abundance. Incense, gold thread, relics, processions. Everything is elevated, ornate, and designed to evoke awe. This is precisely what makes it so seductive to designers who traffic in fantasy.
Taylor Hill attends the 'Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination' gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 7 May 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur / MG18 / Getty Images for The Met Museum / Vogue)
But where does that leave belief? In one sense, these fashion shows are a paradox. As church attendance declines in some parts of Europe and the West, Catholic aesthetics are booming. Not in parishes, but in couture . There's something almost liturgical about the way designers like Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana choreograph their events: processions, symbolism, hierarchy, an audience watching with bated breath. If religion has retreated from the centre of public life, perhaps fashion has stepped in. Not as replacement, but as echo.
Still, there's a danger in blurring the lines too far. Liturgical garments aren't just visual flourishes. They are consecrated for a purpose. To replicate them for entertainment or consumption risks stripping them of meaning. At its worst, this becomes 'devotional cosplay'. Pretending to be sacred while selling something very secular.
Pope Leo XIV lays flowers at the Icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary Salus Populi Romani in Rome on 25 May 2025. (Photo by Rocco Spaziani / Archivio Rocco Spaziani / Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)
Yet this doesn't mean the line between fashion and faith is impenetrable. There's a long history of dialogue between the church and the arts. Think of the splendour of medieval reliquaries, the pageantry of Baroque altarpieces, or the richness of Gothic vestments woven in gold. At its best, fashion inspired by faith can open up a conversation about beauty, transcendence, memory and the persistence of the sacred in a post-religious age.
Indeed, the fascination with Catholic aesthetics may say more about our time than about the church. In an era of digital overload and moral uncertainty, the forms of traditional religion still exert a pull. They offer not just visual drama but a kind of spiritual grammar — symbols of order, mystery, devotion and eternity. Fashion latches onto these not always because it understands them, but because it recognises their power.
Interior of the Duomo di Milano. (Photo by gkuna / iStock / Getty Images)
Perhaps that's the deeper story. The success of these religiously infused shows, despite (or because of) the outrage, reveals a hunger for meaning that art alone cannot satisfy. There's a reason why even in protest, the language used is one of sacrilege, desecration, reverence. These are not merely clothes. And perhaps that's why they matter.
In the end, we don't need to decide once and for all whether this is tribute or travesty. That's too simple. The more interesting questions are: What happens when devotion becomes design? When belief becomes aesthetic? And can beauty — honest, challenging, provocative beauty — still serve as a bridge between heaven and earth?
Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the UK and an Australian historian of Central Europe at the Australian Catholic University. He is general Editor of Brepols' East Central Europe series and president of the Australian Early Medieval Association.
