A few years ago I was approached by an editor at a publishing house to see if I was interested in writing a book on religion and U2. I had just taught a class on the band’s musical and spiritual journey and had already done most of the research on the topic, so it seemed like a no-brainer.
As I wrote the introduction and chapter outlines, I began my exploration with a deconstruction of Bono’s clothing. I wrote about his sunglasses, shoes, and everything in between. You can discover a lot about U2’s worldview from Bono’s way of dress. After I sent the preliminary materials to the editor, their feedback wasn’t positive. They were looking for something more Jesus focused, and while they thought the clothing approach was interesting, it didn’t fit with their vision for the book. I understood to some degree. Fashion and religion are seldom discussed together. It is easy to overlook the importance of dress, particularly from a religious or theological perspective, given its tendency to favor the internal dynamics of the human condition.
“Clothes make the man,” Mark Twain once said. Given that he owned twenty-two custom-made white cashmere suits, he may have been on to something. I have been interested in fashion and clothing for most of my life, ever since my first after-school job in a clothing store. Today, I am still fascinated with beautiful fabrics or the particular cut of a jacket. But I am more interested in how what we wear gives us a sense of ourselves.
The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, in a 1989 essay called “Between Clothing and Nudity,” argues that clothing is what gives humans a sense of being, that what we wear and how we wear it shapes our identity. When the subject of fashion comes up, many people’s immediate responses are connected to Jesus’s statement that we should give no thought to what we eat, drink, or wear. But these are things most of us think about often and carefully. Just walk into a coffee shop and listen to the particular permutations of drinks people order, or consider the growing foodie movement from veganism to food trucks, and you get a sense of the degree to which the simple acts of eating and drinking are filled with careful thought and reflection. So when it comes to clothing, there can be little argument that what we wear is, for most people, a very serious consideration.
We dress to impress, to hide and conceal. We use clothing for effect, decoration, self-expression, and sexual attraction. We use dress to express our gender and to show our religious affiliation, profession, favorite sports team. The list goes on. Long before we speak, our dress communicates messages that we all translate, judge, and respond to. We read one another’s clothing and determine things such as age and socioeconomic status, but we also gauge moods, personality, and interests from it. I use the word judge intentionally, because we do make judgments based on what we encounter people wearing.
Some days, I dress up not necessarily to impress anyone, but because it makes me feel better about myself. When I am having a rough time, I turn toward more formal clothes. I spend time choosing what to wear, and I wear pieces that mean something to me and that I enjoy wearing (I also go to therapy, but that’s for another essay). Something about the process boosts my confidence and gives me an emotional lift. People go shopping for the same reason. It’s more than a distraction or a sign of our capitulation to materialism; the way we clothe ourselves goes deeper than the external elements.
While all of this reflects the personal decisions and emotions behind our clothing choices, clothing is never simply a personal matter. What we wear has an effect on others; it can shape lines of communication between us. The way we dress sends cues ranging from “Notice me!” to “Ignore me!”
If I were to say something about the challenge facing Christianity today, I would characterize it as a problem of appearance. For many, Christianity is dressed in a style long gone from this world. Practicing Christianity is like journeying into another time, glimpsing into history. Many people in religious circles critique our contemporary culture’s preference for surface over depth, and they are concerned about the spiritual cost of a fascination with the superficial external at the expense of the internal.
The real issue is that many in the religious world are unable to dress themselves to fit the times—to dress their ways of speaking about God in such a manner that they can be interpreted and understood on their own terms in this world. I’m not simply talking about following fashion trends or attempting to be relevant (one of those bywords whose invocation means you are hopelessly out of touch).
A fashion blog I frequent, called Threadbared, featured an interview with theologian Cornel West last year. The interview’s focus was not race, justice, or religion, but his clothing. West wears a daily uniform: a three-piece black suit (he owns five), a white shirt with cufflinks, and a scarf, tie, socks, and shoes—all black. In the interview, he linked his choice of clothing (like Johnny Cash) to his calling to bear witness to love and justice in a dark world. The clothes are an “extension of the man,” West said. Fashion and dress offer us visual clues by which to approach our time, ways to read and interpret messages about our lives and the present cultural moment. A theology of fashion is one that reads the signs of the times and dresses accordingly, shifting not with the whims of seasonal trends, but with a sense of calling and intention.
I have been interested in a theology of fashion for quite some time. I came of age after the upheaval of the 1960s, when long hair on men was a focus of government debate in the House of Commons. But I was also around when similar public debates over punks and their degenerate dress and behavior filled the British cultural and political arteries. I realize that, for many, there are far weightier matters to address, but I am not the only one interested. When discussing what he termed the “lordless powers” in his Church Dogmatics lectures, theologian Karl Barth included fashion in his list of things like transportation and technology that operate as “demonic powers” in culture. “Who inspires and directs these processes, which are not a matter of indifference to the feeling for life and all that it implies?” Barth asks. He was questioning where the authority and guidance for the way we shape our lives comes from. His response was that rather than coming from God, he believed some “released spirit of the earth” was responsible for the fashion industry’s ability to generate such “horror and amusement” each season.
Now, there are questions about the fashion industry that can and need to be addressed—the role of advertising, marketing, and lifestyle branding, for instance—but these are secondary issues for me. I am more interested in the way dress functions as a visible code by which we communicate. The story of Adam and Eve is often both the beginning and end of most theological conversations about clothing, and it centers on the consequences of sin. But this is too shallow a read. The shame they felt for eating the fruit of the tree might not have been simply guilt for disobeying God, but a consequence of realizing they couldn’t administer the wisdom and rule that came with the knowledge they had gained. In a sense, they weren’t dressed for the job. I said previously that the concept of nudity in our culture is inseparable from its theological signature.
The opposite is also true: how we dress is theologically linked to this story too. This is not the Bible’s sole story about the pertinence of clothing. It has many stories where the interplay of dress and wisdom interconnect—Joseph’s coat of many colors, David cutting a corner of Saul’s robe, Elijah’s cloak, God’s command to place tassels on the edge of priestly garments, John the Baptist’s camelhair clothing, the dividing of Jesus’s cloak. The color of your shirt runs deeper than dyes or threads—it’s forever entwined with something far more sacred than meets the eye.