Fashion icons Versace and Vogue have joined forces with the Vatican to showcase the Church’s influence on fashion.
Liturgical vestments with intricate patchworks of gold and silver thread embroidery, jewelled mitres and historic papal tiaras (one comprising 18,000 diamonds) have been provided for the exhibition by the Sistine Chapel sacristy.
In all, raiment from 15 papacies will be included in an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition – dubbed “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” – opens in May.
The show will also include designer clothing by fashion houses including Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and Chanel, along with exhibits of the Museum’s medieval and religious artwork.
“Some might consider fashion to be an unfitting or unseemly medium by which to engage with ideas about the sacred or the divine,” curator Andrew Bolton says.
“But dress is central to any discussion about religion. It affirms religious allegiances and, by extension, it asserts religious differences.”
On Monday fashion designer Donatella Versace, Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino, along with designers Thom Browne and Jean Charles de Castelbajac joined Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine.
Along with a group of journalists, they met with Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s de facto culture minister, for a sneak preview of some of the exhibits.
“From the first pages of the Bible, God enters the scene certainly as a creator, but also as a tailor,” said the cardinal.
He backed this up, citing a passage from Genesis where God made garments of skin for Adam and Eve and clothed them.
“God himself worries about clothing his creatures, and this represents the genesis of the significance of clothing.”
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