This chapter examines how fashion designers used Catholic religious dress—the attire of priests, monks, and nuns—to inspire and innovate their designs. This ecclesiastical trend expanded fashion’s use and materialization of religion, constituting another step in placing the divine on designer garments. The chapter first addresses how the uniform of Catholic religious became fashionable in the mid-twentieth century. It then investigates the work of specific designers, such as the Fontana sisters, Rudi Gernreich, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Walter Holmes, who catapulted this trend to popularity in the late 1960s amid a changing American religious landscape. The chapter examines the re-emergence of this trend in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In both time periods, the construction of the designers’ personal biographies and their fashion aesthetics fostered the celebration of some collections and the criticism of others. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on how fashion focused people’s attention on the visual and material experience of religion.
Religious Dress and the Making of Women Preachers in Australia, 1880–1934
