When the Metropolitan Costume Institute’s new exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” opens to the public tomorrow, visitors willsee over 40 vestments on loan, for the first time, from the Vatican. Also on display will be an array of divine, in a less literal sense, garments by modern fashion designers — among them, a monastic genital-revealing Rick Owens tunic, a winged Dior haute couture wedding gown and a Cristóbal Balenciaga evening coat that resembles a 16th-century cardinal’s cape — all informed by the visual traditions of Catholicism. While the show is the Costume Institute’s largest to date, in terms of square footage, its contents represent just a fraction of the collections that have drawn inspiration from the church. Here, the next generation of designers exploring theCatholic imagination.

Palomo Spain

Every Easter, the religious festival of Semana Santa transforms the streets of Seville, Spain, into a baroque Catholic fantasy. Churchgoers dressed in robes with conical hoods process through the city with ornately carved statuettes of saints swathed in gold brocade garments. “Growing up, I wasn’t going to Chanel shows, I was going to see Jesus Christ on his cross walking around the city,” says the designer Alejandro Gómez Palomo, 26, who was raised in a Catholic family in a village in Southern Spain and walked in the Semana Santa procession almost every year as a child. “Of course that has a lot to do with what I do as a designer,” he says.

In 2015, Gómez Palomo founded the brand Palomo Spain, which shows during men’s fashion week but flouts the idea of gendered collections. His ruffled rococo pieces — embroidered satin capes, high-collared tulle cassocks and flamboyant puff-sleeve silk bustiers — are geared toward freedom of expression and inclusivity. They also visibly reference the shapes and fabrics of the religious garments that Gómez Palomo first encountered as a choirboy in his local church. “As a kid, the church was the only thing that had something to do with fashion that was outside of the normality of everyday life,” he says. In Catholic paintings, he always thought, there was not much difference between Jesus’s tunic and an evening gown.

For his collections, Gómez Palomo now works with many of the Spanish artisans who embroider the religious garments seen during Semana Santa. But he repurposes their centuries-old techniques, many of which are in danger of disappearing, to create “something more modern,” he explains. “I’m a young designer who is very related to my generation,” he says, and while his references may be traditional, his vision is not; he designs garments for everyone, regardless of gender. Last year, Beyoncé posed with her newborn twins, in a photograph that invoked the Madonna and Child, wearing a cascading silk organza Palomo Spain robe.

Dilara Findikoglu

The London-based designer Dilara Findikoglu, 27, grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, in a religious — but not strict, she says — Muslim household. “Having an Islamic family pushed me to question what religion was,” she says. “My family was happy, but I saw how religion brought conflict to my country. I wondered: Is it real or a fiction?” While studying at Central Saint Martins in London, that question became central to her work: Her darkly glamorous tailoring and gothic dresses often incorporate religious and occult iconography.

For her first runway show, in September 2017, Findikoglu presented her collection — a meditation on religion that featured costumed characters including a pope and a nun — in an Anglican church in central London. Among the models was Violet Chachki, the winner of the seventh season of the reality competition show “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who wore a pair of black felt horns and a red velvet jacket printed with Renaissance etchings of angels. The show’s venue and repurposing of sacred imagery caused the British media “to freak out,” says Findikoglu. In the U.S., the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones described the event as “a satanic orgy” on his website Infowars.

But Findikoglu’s intention, when using religious imagery, is simply to “create awareness, to give people something to think about,” she says. She respects the power of Catholic iconography— even if she reimagines it in her own punky visual language. For her most recent show, she outfitted a character she named Eve in a diaphanous, breast-baring white and gold dress that referenced the devotional Botticelli painting “La Primavera.” “She was just a representation of birth, origins,” explains Findikoglu of the religious reference. “I use a lot of religious symbols, even if I don’t believe in it — I love the visuals of it.” Her home in East London, she says, is “filled with cherubs.”

Vaquera

Last February, the New York-based brand Vaquera closed out its fall/winter 2018 runway show with a two-foot-tall gem-encrusted cross, carried by a model wearing a cloudlike dress of white tulle and broderie anglaise. The look anchored a collection with two central references: Catholicism and casinos. The former theme, the brand says, was not intended to align with the subject of the Met Costume Institute show, of which the designers were unaware. But align it did — and one fashion website proposed a campaign to include the brand in the exhibition: “#VaqueraForTheMet.” Other looks in the show includeda teal cargo jumpsuit with a matching miter, an oversized polo dress topped with a red velvet cardinal’s biretta, and a high-necked white dress that evoked an adult-size christening gown.

“We like to be explicit,” says Patric DiCaprio, who designs Vaquera along with Bryn Taubensee, Claire Sully and David Moses. DiCaprio and Sully were both raised Catholic and Catholic school uniforms have often been a reference in the brand’s collections, but this show was its most overt exploration of religion yet. “It’s really visual, and really easy to relate to what’s happening now in visual culture, with Instagram, with celebrity worship,” DiCaprio says.The collection was a commentary on “what’s happening in America now, with faith and doubt.”

“Our generation is struggling to find who their new gods are,” says Taubensee. So, the designers presented their own suggestions, via a series of what they call “saints polos”: collared dresses that depicted the faces of the designers Martin Margiela, Vivienne Westwood, Andre Walker and Miguel Adrover — Vaquera’s own communion of fashion saints. But the brand’s references aren’t always so devout. While researching the collection, the designers drew inspiration from “not just actual Catholic religious garments but also the priest Halloween costume that you can buy at Party City,” DiCaprio explains. It was another instance of the brand’s imaginative, narrative approach to fashion. Vaquera is about “telling a story without opening your mouth, which I think is very Catholic,” he says.