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Intended as a pilgrimage and encompassing the Cloisters as well as the main museum, it explores both the sumptuous and the monastic sides of the Church’s imagery. The show coordinates treasures borrowed from the Vatican and designer fashion-displayed on 150 specially made mannequins modeled in part on the somewhat androgynous statue of Joan of Arc at the Cathedral of Reims-with the Met’s own works of religious art. Many of the featured designers, such as Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Lacroix, and John Galliano, are known for their flights of extraordinary fancy, virtuoso technique, and extravagant embellishment. It’s hard to imagine my nuns being in a direct arc of inspiration to Chanel’s sleek black dresses, and on to Givenchy’s iconic black dress for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I hope, no matter what your faith, this will cause you to reflect on whether your religion has had an influence on your creative development.” “And what struck me is how religion-Catholicism in particular-has really shaped the mind of these designers with a richness of imagery, a storytelling tradition, and seeing the world through metaphor. “As a curator you’re always interested in what lies behind creativity and the creative impulse,” says Andrew Bolton, who dreamed up the exhibition. The Church was like Hotel California: You could check out but you could never leave. The iconography was not merely an accessory. The rich tableaux of Catholic frescoes, mosaics, statues, paintings, music, fashion, and sacred rites inflamed our imaginations and became objects of desire. Male vestments, embroidered and ironed by legions of women, meant that power had been endowed those clothes said, “Here is one of the aristocrats of the Church here is royalty here is a person to be noticed.’’ All of the glittery clothes and elaborate rituals and potent storytelling and golden sacred objects were meant to show the Church’s tribal power, then and now held by men who were clearly terrified of women. We may have been covered up, but when we looked up, we saw objects of beauty, an iconography that represented magic and miracles and mystery and power and classicism and drama. The pope does not wear Prada.) It quickly became apparent that the men had taken all the good clothes. (Pope Benedict would later sport red loafers so rad they were falsely assumed to be Prada. Watching the pope on TV, we saw a man sparkling with bejeweled miters and shimmering cloaks and elegant shoes. Yet at Easter and Christmas, we saw iridescent peacocks: priests and bishops cloaked in glistening white and red robes embellished with silver and gold thread, suffused in smoke from the swinging censer, with a hypnotic sound track of tinkling bells and soaring hymns. Previewing “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute was a Proustian experience for me, a remembrance of things past-some sweet, some scary. Growing up Catholic in America in the mid-century was a heady, paradoxical blend of excitement and repression, glamour and asceticism, mystery and cruelty, sensuality and sexism, beautiful lace mantillas and ugly saddle shoes.

We knew to get up and follow them, single file, out of the theater. “Now, what was your preference: the leg or the breast?” she drawled provocatively as Wayne squirmed.

The blonde leaned over Wayne, spilling out of her bodice, and brandished a platter of chicken. Everything was fine until we came to a dinner-party scene with the soldiers and their Southern hostess, a beautiful blonde in a low-cut red dress.

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When I was in third grade, the nuns took our class on an outing to a John Wayne movie called The Horse Soldiers, about a group of Civil War officers charged with razing a Confederate railroad depot.

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