Vatican bling takes center stage at new fashion exhibit
Tiaras encrusted with thousands of diamonds, emeralds and rubies. Papal cloaks and vestments with golden embroidery so fine they took 16 years to produce.
If you’re going to wield power, you need to dress the part — and it seems few have understood that better than the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church through the centuries. That’s one of the key takeaways from the latest mega-exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, a look at the influence of Catholicism on fashion. It opens Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.
If you’re looking for modern examples of the relationship between the two, consider that they called Pope Benedict XVI the “Prada Pope,” based on rumors — urban legend, it turns out — that his stylish red loafers were from the storied fashion house. They weren’t, and actually his predecessor, John Paul II, had a similar pair, now on display at the Met — part of a long papal tradition. That didn’t stop Benedict from being named Esquire’s 2007 Accessorizer of the Year.
But examples go back earlier — WAY earlier, according to “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” the Met’s annual spring fashion exhibit and the biggest one yet, spanning a full 25 galleries and stretching from the Metropolitan on Fifth Avenue to its Cloisters branch in upper Manhattan. As always, the show makes its debut at the star-studded Met Gala on Monday night. Will the celebrity bling match the Vatican bling? Not likely.
Take, for example, just one stunning tiara that glimmers in the Institute’s galleries, a three-tiered concoction that gleams with 19,000 gems — 18,000 of them diamonds, along with rubies, sapphires and emeralds. It was a gift from Queen Isabella of Spain to the 19th-century Pope Pius IX, who wore it at Christmas Mass in 1854.
Or a huge white-and-gold papal mantle — a voluminous cape of taffeta embroidered with gold metal thread, tinsel and paillettes. A set of 12 such vestments took 15 workers some 16 years to complete, the museum says.
They are just a few of the 42 items that curator Andrew Bolton, who has become known for his blockbuster Met exhibits, brought back from the Sistine Chapel’s sacristy at the Vatican. Bolton made 12 trips over two years to secure the items, many which had never been outside the Vatican; in an interview this weekend in the galleries, he described hunching over to get through “an itty bitty door” at the edge of the chapel, where inside, untold treasures awaited.
Each time he looked in the labyrinthine sacristy, he would see more tantalizing items. “I asked for six,” he says. “I ended up with 42.” The Vatican’s only condition was that its works be exhibited on their own, separate from the fashion part of the show. The Vatican collection even has its own separate volume in the show’s huge catalog.
Bolton says he realizes people may think there’s something unseemly about connecting the commercial theme of fashion with lofty theme of religion.