Vatican, Versace and Anna Wintour team up for Catholic fashion exhibition
The ‘Heavenly Bodies’ show, featuring precious treasures from the Sistine Chapel, to go on display at New York Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute in May
The Vatican’s culture minister joined designer Donatella Versace and Vogue’s Anna Wintour on Monday to offer a sneak preview of gorgeous Vatican liturgical vestments, jewelled mitres and historic papal tiaras that will star in a spring exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The event, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, opens on May 10 and represents the most extensive exhibition of the museum’s Costume Institute, officials said.
It also represents the first time some of the Vatican’s most precious treasures from the Sistine Chapel sacristy are being exhibited outside the Vatican.
Along with the papal treasures, the Met show includes garments for more ordinary mortals by designers spanning Azzedine Alia to Vivienne Westwood, all set against the backdrop of the Met’s collection of medieval and religious artwork.
“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 a crowd of Roman fashionistas and journalists.
“But dress is central to any discussion about religion. It affirms religious allegiances and, by extension, it asserts religious differences.”
The exhibition, featuring about 40 Vatican vestments and accessories spanning 15 papacies, will be spread among various Met galleries as well as the Cloisters branch in upper Manhattan in what organisers called a planned “pilgrimage” blending fashion, faith and art.