'Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination' Review: A Gift From the Sartorial Gods

May 9, 2018 7:13 p.m. ET

New York

Chasuble. Chalice. Crosier. Monstrance. Mitre. The words themselves are dipped in gold, and each has its glittering place in a hierarchy of symbolic dress and timeless imagery. Sun rays like spears, piercing the flock with light. Sacred wounds spilling blood, sacrificial and ecstatic. The cross, a design genuflection that is both abstract and transcendent. The martyred saints. The winged angels. Gilt reliquaries housing bits of bone. Renunciation clothed in costume of material luxe. Catholicism!

“Catholics live in an enchanted world,” writes the theologian and novelist

Andrew Greeley

in “The Catholic Imagination,” published in 2000, “a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures.” These are mere hints, Greeley continues, of a “religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation.” Enter the Met. Its spring exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” places couture and ready-to-wear from the 20th and 21st centuries amid the museum’s religious triptychs, altars and artifacts, an idea so right, so inevitably majestic, that it’s amazing it never happened here before.

As it turns out, most of the designers whose work cried for inclusion in this show were raised Catholic. No matter if they lapsed; the church’s iconography, steeped into the soul, remains a reference and inspiration, voluptuous and transporting. Gianni Versace,

Domenico Dolce

and

Stefano Gabbana,

Pierpaolo Piccioli (for Valentino),

Jean Paul Gaultier,

Christian Lacroix,

John Galliano,

Alexander McQueen

and

Thom Browne

—the younger generation.

Elsa Schiaparelli,

Coco Chanel,

Madame Grès

and

Cristobal Balenciaga

—from the midcentury. These designers dominate, but the exhibition’s more than 150 ensembles come from 50-plus designers and grace more space than any Costume Institute show has thus far: 60,000 square feet at the Met Fifth Avenue and the Met Cloisters. Large as it is, “Heavenly Bodies” is so disciplined in its choices and laid out with such a light touch that it feels unforced, airy, as if the Met’s art and architecture were enjoying a visitation from kindred spirits.

The exhibition begins with processions in the parallel Byzantine Galleries, where shimmeringly beaded and sequined dresses by Versace (autumn/winter 1997-98) and Dolce & Gabbana (autumn/winter 2013-14) nod to the Byzantine mosaics and metalwork that influenced their creation.

Andrew Bolton,

who organized the show and is the

Wendy Yu

curator in charge of the Costume Institute, has said he wanted “to evoke both the concept and the experience of a religious pilgrimage,” and he achieves this in the hall of Medieval and Byzantine Art. Here the classic silhouettes of Catholicism’s earthly personae and celestial pantheon—the bishop’s soutane, the nun’s habit, the pope’s “cappa magna,” the Virgin Mary’s spire-like sheath, the armor of

Joan of Arc

and the orders of angelology—find themselves poetically acknowledged and exquisitely, sometimes outrageously, reinvented. Simultaneously, we are invited to look again at the specific artwork that frames the dresses—paintings and sculptures we’ve walked by for years without noticing.

Make sure to look up.

Thierry Mugler’s

diamanté gown in virgin blue (autumn/winter 1984-85), invoking the Assumption of Mary, floats above an archway and blesses the long view into the

Robert Lehman Wing,

where a tableau of angels awaits. These gowns, two made by

Jean Lanvin

in the 1930s and the rest from a 2011 capsule collection by Rodarte, suggest an early-Renaissance rainbow, their colors the saturated pastels of

Giotto

and the lapis lazuli of

Fra Angelico.

The coup of the exhibition resides downstairs in the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Approximately 40 vestments from the Sistine Chapel Sacristy—rarely (if ever) released papal mantles and chasubles, priceless tiaras, rings and crosses—speak to the way sumptuous earthly beauty engages the divine. Marvel at embroidered biblical stories, the stitching so fine and nuanced it dissolves into an almost photographic sheen. Here is an echelon of embellished artistry that any czar, king or emperor would envy. Upstarts all, they’ve been trumped by God.

Do not forgo a trip to the Cloisters, where Mr. Bolton’s choices are in such intimate dialogue with the art they look like they could live here. The mood is often playful—

Craig Green’s

knight-like suits of bold medallions (autumn/winter 2017-18) seem to have stepped out of the “Nine Heroes” tapestries that surround them. It is sometimes severe:

Olivier Theyskens,

using four long slits held in place by simple hooks and eyes, produces a black taffeta gown fit for a goth princess, a cross of bare skin on her chest (spring/summer 1999). And the Passion prevails amid the Unicorn tapestries, where Thom Browne’s wedding dress of 2018, wrought from ribbons of white tulle, hovers like a strange cloud. On the bodice, the creature’s head and horn are formed with twisted tulle and gold bullion. On the back, yes, there they are, the subtle stab wounds (Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do) that we see in the tapestries.

Another lone vision in white—the holy grail of fashion purists—is Balenciaga’s wedding dress of spring 1967. It is posed in glorious isolation, back to the viewer, in a stone apse. This glacial cone of satin has long been one of the most revered designs in fashion history, a mysterious evocation of untouchedness. It was long believed to be conceived with one seam. Mr. Bolton discovered it actually has three. The Trinity.

—Ms. Jacobs writes about culture and fashion for Vanity Fair.