The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newest exhibition will be one of its most controversial. The Guardian reports that the Costume Institute’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination will showcase vestments and accessories to the public that have never before been released by the Vatican in order to examine the intersection of fashion and Catholicism.
“Some might consider fashion to be an unfitting or unseemly medium by which to engage with ideas about the sacred or the divine,” curator Andrew Bolton told press this week. “But dress is central to any discussion about religion. It affirms religious allegiances and, by extension, it asserts religious differences.”
The ecclesiastical artifacts reportedly span 15 papacies and will go on display in the museum this May. US Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour told the press earlier this week, with Vatican culture minister Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi and Donatella Versace, that “fashion does not operate in a vacuum,” and “no one understands that more clearly than Andrew.”
“When I go to these fashion exhibitions I’m always so amazed to see people from all sides of the globe and all walks of life really studying the exhibitions, understanding that fashion does not operate in a vacuum,” Wintour said.
This year’s highly anticipated Met Gala, featuring fashion’s most famous faces, will take place on May 7. Referred to as “The Oscars of the Fashion World,” it will be fascinating to see how top designers take on the marriage of religious iconography and the red carpet.
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