Vestments Without Grace: ‘The Gospel According to Gabbana’

Rome is no stranger to pageantry. Processions, papal Masses, and the gilded choreography of baroque liturgy have long stitched the Eternal City into a living tapestry of the sacred and sublime. But this summer, at the base of Castel Sant’Angelo and under the gaze of Bernini’s angels, it was not the Vatican but the fashion house of Dolce & Gabbana that seized the stage. On the Ponte Sant’Angelo—a historic pilgrim route to St Peter’s—designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana unveiled an opening sequence so rich in liturgical drama that, at a glance, it might have been mistaken for the entry rite of a Pontifical High Mass.

And then came the spectacle: theatrical representations of what appeared to be cardinals and various other clergy, robed in stylised vestments, moved in solemn procession across the bridge. They were not real prelates (at least, as far as this author is aware), but models dressed in ecclesiastical costume—forty of them—bearing all the visual weight of tradition, but none of its sacramental reality. The effect was astonishing, even surreal: a bridge once used for papal processions repurposed for a fashion show that blurred the line between religious rite and theatrical reverie.

It was the opening salvo in a spectacular evening marking the tenth anniversary of Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Sartoria line. The scene was at once mesmerising and unsettling—an aesthetic triumph wrapped in a theological riddle.

Dolce and Gabbana have long mined the visual vocabulary of Italian Catholicism. Their Sicilian upbringing, steeped in Marian devotion and the chiaroscuro piety of the Baroque, has always informed their design language. Sacred Hearts, votive candles, and images of the Madonna have graced their couture before, not merely as decorative tropes but as cultural artefacts.

But here, something shifted. This was not iconography; this was liturgy—co-opted, stylised, and re-staged. Models appeared in chasubles reimagined in brocade and velvet, in cassock-inspired coats, and mitre-like headpieces embellished with gold thread. Liturgical colours—Roman purple, Pentecostal red, Advent purple—were treated as fashion cues. The solemnities of the sacristy were transposed to the catwalk.

Of course, the ecclesiastical is not unfamiliar territory in fashion. John Galliano, former head of Christian Dior, while not Catholic himself, frequently drew inspiration from Catholic imagery and themes in his designs for Dior, particularly during his tenure as head designer. This fusion of Catholicism and fashion was evident in collections like the Fall/Winter 2000 Haute Couture show, which opened with a model dressed as a pope. But vestments, after all, are themselves a kind of ancient couture: designed to elevate, to sanctify, to draw the eye and the mind heavenward. But they are also more than costume. They are signs—outward vestiges of inward truths. In Catholic theology, clothing is never merely what it seems. The alb denotes baptismal purity; the chasuble, charity; the stole, priestly authority. Each layer of vesture speaks to a sacramental reality, not simply aesthetic effect.

To see them worn—indeed paraded—outside that context is to be confronted with a question the Church herself is perhaps reluctant to ask: when sacred things are stripped of function but retain form, do they still mean what they once did?

There is, amid the spectacle, a deeper provocation the Church must confront. The extraordinary pull of this event—its drama, its colour, its sense of solemn wonder—testifies to something unmistakable: that Catholicism, even in fragments, still speaks. Even when stripped of context and emptied of sacrament, the symbols of the Church retain their power to captivate. They linger in the cultural imagination not as relics of the past, but as clues to a lost way of seeing the world—where the material is never just material, and beauty points to something beyond itself.

But here lies the tragedy. On the Ponte Sant’Angelo, these sacred forms—vestments, processions, figures dressed as clergy—were present, but hollowed out. The gestures remained, but the grace did not. This was form without function, symbol without sacrament, beauty without consecration. The cope, the chasuble, the mitre—they dazzled the eye, but they did not, and could not, mediate the divine.

The Catholic vision has never been content with surface. It sees bread become God, oil as healing, words as absolution. It makes bold claims about the material world—not as fashion or spectacle, but as the very arena in which heaven has the potential to touch earth. The Church’s genius has always been this marriage of the ordinary and the divine: incense and sanctity, water and rebirth, gesture and glory. Her liturgy does not merely suggest the sacred; it effects it.

In that light, what took place on the bridge—though executed with care, and perhaps even longing—was finally a shadow play. An exquisite imitation of something living. A waxwork of a liturgy, beautiful but inert. The models moved like ministers, but there was no altar; the garments glittered, but remained unconsecrated. The whole, though magnificent, was ultimately mute—unable to speak the language of heaven.

And yet, it stirred something. That it could do so—even now—is both an indictment and an invitation. The indictment lies in the fact that it took a fashion house to remind the world of the visual and spiritual splendour that once poured forth from the Church’s life. The invitation lies in the hope that this same splendour might still be recovered—not as ornament or memory, but as mission.

If the world hungers for beauty with meaning, let the Church not offer meaningless beauty. Let her vestments be worn again not just with elegance, but with authority. Let her processions proceed not to cameras, but to Calvary. Let her buildings, her music, her gestures, once again point not inward, but upward.

In a strange way, the Dolce & Gabbana show held up a mirror—not to mock, but to remind. It revealed the outlines of a forgotten grandeur, waiting to be filled again with grace. It showed us what Catholicism looks like when it is only beautiful.

But beauty in Catholicism has never been the end. It is the beginning of a sacramental journey to the Beatific Vision.

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Photo credit: Dolce & Gabbana Facebook

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