Innovating Religious Dress

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.

Introduction

This introduction describes the book’s fashion-focused approach to religion and its central argument. It sets up the concept of fashionable religion, which highlights how fashion constructs a specific vision of Christianity that celebrates beauty and wonder, innovation and enchantment. To establish this, the introduction provides an overview of the book’s primary sources and identifies how the book’s approach differs from existing scholarship on religion and dress. Rather than focusing on what religions do with or say about dress, the introduction highlights the importance of the fashion industry for thinking about the changing religious landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the rise of spirituality and the increase in the religiously unaffiliated or “nones.”

Fashioning Holy Figures

This chapter chronicles how the fashion industry again expanded its use of Christian elements by placing Christian holy figures onto designer garments in the 1990s. Prior to this decade, designers shied away from incorporating representational religious figures in their designs—a trend influenced by iconoclastic controversy in the history of Christianity. The chapter first examines early instances of this trend with the designs of Rei Kawakubo, Kansai Yamamoto, and Gianni Versace. It then analyzes the controversy, lack of comment, and celebration that accompanied subsequent designers’ forays into more figural designs. The chapter places a particular emphasis on Dolce & Gabbana’s “Stromboli” collection, which incorporated numerous images of the Virgin Mary and was the first collection thoroughly dedicated to a Christian theme. It met with widespread celebration from fashion critics and helped establish a Marian focus in fashion design.

Accessorizing the Cross

This chapter examines how Christianity’s dominant symbol, the cross, emerged as one of the earliest and most popular instances of religion moving into fashion, in the form of cross jewelry. The fashionability of cross jewelry is an important step in understanding how God got on a dress. The first part of the chapter highlights the genesis of the cross in modern fashion through the work of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. The chapter then analyzes how cross jewelry became a fashion trend in the late 1960s that reflected and shaped existing religious trends. Lastly, the chapter examines the culture wars controversy that accompanied the cross jewelry trend in the 1980s, with Madonna’s popularity and the rise of the Moral Majority.

Designing New Ways of Seeing Christianity

This chapter examines the religion-oriented articles published by fashion magazines from the mid-1940s through the 1960s. These articles provide a valuable starting point for understanding how fashion conceptualized Christianity during this time. By fusing elements of liberal Protestantism and Catholic art and ritual in their construction of Christianity, fashion magazine articles fostered religious individualism, spiritual tourism, and the decontextualization of Christian elements. After establishing the religious context of the mid-twentieth century, this chapter examines three prominent themes—Christmas, church, and pilgrimage—through which this fashionable vision of Christianity was conveyed. Fashion magazines taught readers how to cultivate a stylish form of Christianity that aligned the sophistication of modernity with the enchantment of religion.

Conclusion

The conclusion focuses on designers putting figures of the divine, especially Jesus, on dresses and other high fashion garments. It pays particular attention to the 2013 collections of Karla Špetić and Dolce & Gabbana and how putting God on a dress reinforces aestheticized ways of seeing Christianity and its heritage. The fashionable religion constructed by the fashion industry fostered the shift toward an expansive religious individualism and eclecticism, exhibited by the seekers of the 1960s, the spiritually minded of the 1990s, and the nones of the 2010s.

Making Over Christianity

While chapter 1 focuses on religion-oriented articles in fashion magazines, which situated Christianity alongside fashion, this chapter examines advertisements, which explicitly merged Christian language, concepts, and gestures with the world of fashion. This inclusion simultaneously demonstrated the de facto Christian character of the fashion industry and how fashion advertisements constructed a particular way of seeing Christianity. This chapter analyzes how fashion advertising’s visualization and materialization of Christianity constituted an important step in the movement of religious symbols from the textual and visual discourse surrounding fashion to its material embodiment in fashion accessories and attire. In combining elements of fashion with those of Christianity, advertisements made over Christianity into a modern and sophisticated consumer-oriented enterprise. These advertisements established Christian churches as places to exhibit fashion; put a modern twist on Christian theological concepts, such as miracles and angels; constructed Eve as a chic Christian heroine; and infused Christianity with some modern magic.