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Conclave Couture: High Fashion’s Obsession with Catholic Imagery

From the runway to the red carpet, Catholic iconography has become fashion’s most sacred obsession. With mitres, rosaries and relics reimagined as style statements, designers and pop stars alike keep returning to the drama of the divine.

A collage featuring Rihanna in papal couture, Madonna, a model in skeletal design, and rosaries intertwined with chains.
YouTube/ MTV/ EWTN/ Vogue/ fashionmodamuoti. (Image by Olivia Sarno/Trill)

From altar boys in Balenciaga to models dressed as cardinals, Catholic aesthetics have long had high fashion in a headlock. Designers return again and again to fashion plundered from the church: its iconography, architecture, relics, and robes. What began as religious iconography becomes aesthetic language.

Mitres are reworked as silhouettes, vestments turned into statements. In fashion, the line between reverence and rebellion is always thin. Catholicism, for all its ritual and contradiction, offers an archive that designers can’t resist. This ongoing fascination underscores how Catholic iconography in fashion continues to inspire and provoke.

Jean Paul Gaultier and papal drama

Jean Paul Gaultier is arguably the high priest of ecclesiastical fashion. In 1993, his Fall/Winter collection opened with a model dressed in a white cardinal-style hat and blood-red robes. Crucifixes hung heavy from ears and waists. Hair was twisted into crown-of-thorns halos. The collection was decadent, even devotional—until it wasn’t. One model emerged with a rosary tucked into a black PVC thong, a skeletal white dress mimicked the silhouette of a bishop’s robes but clung to the body like wet linen: the divine met the perverse.

In 2007, he returned to the altar with his Spring couture collection. It looked less like Paris Fashion Week, more like a Vatican procession. Cassocks were cut into evening gowns. Rosary beads swung from sheer veils. Mitres were reimagined as towering headpieces, balancing Catholic grandeur with Gaultier’s usual sense of play. His models looked both sanctified and seductive: choir-boy collars, lace gloves, and veils met skin, silk, and suggestion. It was haute couture filtered through the stained-glass window of the cathedral.

Gaultier, raised in a Catholic household, has long flirted with religious aesthetics, often in ways that challenge orthodoxy. These collections weren’t just about shock value. They played with the tension between sin and sanctity, indulgence and restraint. Gaultier’s altar isn’t about reverence. It’s about spectacle.

Dolce & Gabbana’s Sicilian devotion

Where Gaultier teases the sacred and profane, Dolce & Gabbana embrace full papal excess. Their Fall/Winter 2013 collection was a love letter to Southern Catholicism, layered in ornate iconography and high drama. Models walked the runway in dresses emblazoned with saints and martyrs, their heads crowned with gilded halos and floral crowns. One wore a tunic cut like a liturgical robe. Another, veiled in black lace, resembled a widow in a Sicilian funeral procession.

For Domenico Dolce, raised in a devout Catholic family in Sicily, this was a deeply personal collection. It channelled the kind of Catholicism that’s inherited through generations, where religion seeps into culture, aesthetics, and family life. But this wasn’t pious dressing. It was sensual, opulent, and designed to turn heads. Lace clung to curves. Bodices hinted at confessionals of a different kind.

Fashion critics praised the richness of the imagery, but some Catholic voices took offence, arguing that Dolce & Gabbana’s obsession with Catholic iconography often veers into aesthetic tourism. Their use of saints and Madonnas, especially as mere surface print, has drawn criticism for reducing belief to visual shorthand. It’s a performance of piety, an operatic gesture rather than a spiritual one. The Vatican, however, remained notably silent. Perhaps because, despite the provocation, the collection revealed a genuine affection for Catholic artistry.

The Met Gala’s Heavenly Bodies

No moment fused fashion and Catholicism more notably than the 2018 Met Gala. The theme: “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” The red carpet? An ecclesiastical reverie.

Rihanna arrived dressed as a pope in Maison Margiela by John Galliano, complete with a mitre dripping in pearls. Zendaya channelled Joan of Arc in custom Versace chainmail. Lana Del Rey wore a Gucci gown complete with a sacred heart pierced by seven swords, veils cascading over her shoulders like a reliquary come to life. The red carpet became a mass of camp iconography. Gold, lace, crucifixes, and halos flooded Instagram feeds. It was dazzling, controversial, and deeply unserious – the carpet resembled a Vegas chapel over the Vatican.

The accompanying exhibition at The Met drew over 1.6 million visitors, making it the most attended fashion exhibit in the museum’s history. Curated with input from the Vatican, it showcased over 40 pieces from the Sistine Chapel sacristy alongside works from Gaultier, Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino, and McQueen. Suddenly, Catholic iconography was not only fashionable but institutionally blessed.

Yet the event wasn’t without criticism. Some accused it of trivialising religious symbols for spectacle. Critics asked whether the gala’s attendees understood the weight of the symbols they wore, or if Catholicism had simply become another costume. Others pointed out the contradictions of an industry often seen as secular or irreverent, now drawing inspiration from sacred rites. Still, the Met Gala made it clear: Catholicism had crossed over, from the pulpit to pop culture.

The Madonna effect

Long before fashion houses dared to dress models like clergy, Madonna had already rewritten the rules of sacred style. In her 1989 Like a Prayer video, she danced before an altar in a silk slip, kissed a Black saint, and stood among burning crosses; holiness meeting hedonism. Pepsi dropped her. The Vatican condemned her. But pop culture anointed her queen.

Madonna didn’t just wear Catholic symbols, she weaponised them. In tour looks and magazine shoots, she draped herself in crucifixes, layered veils with lingerie, and turned the rosary from a religious tool into a style statement. She took the aesthetics of Catholic girlhood: uniforms, obedience, penance, and flipped them into armour. Her 1984 Like a Virgin performance in a wedding dress and ‘Boy Toy’ belt was not naïve. It was strategic, soaked in Catholic contradiction.

In her 2006 Confessions Tour, she performed Live to Tell suspended on a mirrored crucifix, wearing a crown of thorns. It reignited the old fury. But for Madonna, outrage was the point. Her provocations were never hollow: they challenged power, especially patriarchal power. She queered the sacred, placed it on women’s bodies, and asked who gets to be holy. Like Gaultier, Madonna finds freedom in blasphemy.

Her influence lingers. In the decades since, artists from Lady Gaga to Rosalía have borrowed from the Madonna playbook: lace veils, sacred hearts, and hints of divine transgression. It’s not just fashion, it’s theology with an edge.

Catholic iconography in mainstream fashion

Today, Catholic aesthetics remain a potent visual currency for designers and digital subcultures alike. London-based Dilara Findikoglu, known for her gothic-feminist couture, frequently plays with ecclesiastical motifs. Her shows feature models in blood-red lace and corsetry that evoke confessionals, with jewellery shaped like relics. One look might resemble a saintly martyr, another a fallen angel. Her work resists tidy moral binaries just as Madonna’s did, asking: can a woman be holy and carnal at once?

On TikTok and Pinterest, ‘Catholic core’ is a thriving niche. Think lace-trimmed dresses, modesty juxtaposed with sensuality, antique crucifixes, and ethereal lighting. It’s both a meme and a moodboard, soundtracked by Ethel Cain and Jeff Buckley. Gen Z recontextualises Catholic aesthetics with irony, nostalgia, and occasional sincerity. They mix archive Jean Paul Gaultier with thrifted communion veils. They reference saints and sinners in the same breath.

@aussiedomxo raised catholic to goth girl pipeline going strong @Sam 🖤🦇 #southerngothic #ethelcain #ethelcaincore #southerngoth #creepychurch #catholicvibes #halloweencostume @Officeseven #officeseven ♬ Sun Bleached Flies – Ethel Cain

This ongoing fascination reveals how Catholic iconography in fashion continues to provoke and inspire. However, the new wave of visual rebellion often bypasses doctrine entirely. For many, it’s not about religion; it’s about aesthetic resonance. The appeal lies in the tension: beauty and brutality, faith and failure, obedience and eroticism.

Faith in fashion

Fashion has always been a mirror for power, and Catholicism, with its rituals, garments, and iconography, is a wellspring of it. From Gaultier’s cathedral of couture to Madonna’s pop-provocation, these aesthetics are endlessly resurrected, sanctified by runways and sanctuaries alike.

Collage featuring crosses as jewelery and a large catholic cathedral.
Collage featuring crosses as jewelery and a large catholic cathedral. (Credit: Pexels. Image by Ashley Martel)

But what does it mean to wear the sacred? Does fashion sanctify or secularise Catholic imagery? Perhaps it does both. It can honour the beauty of religious art while also challenging its authority. In fashion’s hands, even the most dogmatic symbol becomes fluid: an object of desire, critique, or simply style.

As long as designers crave the drama of redemption, the opulence of guilt, and the shimmer of gold leaf on stone, Catholic iconography will remain stitched into fashion’s fabric. Not because it preaches, but because it performs.

Written By

Fashion writer studying for an MA in Journalism at Leeds Trinity University, currently writing for Trill Mag.

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