Religion: Fashion & Fig Leaves

For nearly an hour last week Pope Pius XII discoursed on the subject of clothes to 70 delegates of Rome’s first International Congress of High Fashion. His gist: Adam’s and Eve’s fig leaves set a sound fashion for fallen man. In the speech, the Pope displayed remarkable literary flair. On one hand, he said, clothes are a kind of language. “They tell us who is happy and who in mourning, who is rich, who is poor. They allow us to distinguish between the sacred and the profane.” At the same time, clothes also have the function of concealment. “There are certain acts, most honest in themselves because carried out by divine arrangement, which need nevertheless to be protected by a veil of shadow and hidden by reserved silence, so as to ensure respect for their great end.”

No one can deny, the Pope continued, that there is such a thing as fashion that is “shameless, which causes perturbation in ordered spirits and may be an incentive to evil.” Such fashions are bad, however esthetic they may be. Man “quickly notices hidden shamelessness and seduction . . . Although creators of impudent fashions are skillful in contrabanding perversion by mixing it with esthetic elements which are honest in themselves, human sensuality is unfortunately even cleverer in discovering it and in being readily fascinated by it.” And even though the cut be modest, the cloth “may be guilty of excessive luxury, which is an offense to the spirit of those who labor and toil.”

Fashion molders must create in the public a desire for pure fashions. “To achieve this aim, you will have not only to work but to struggle. You will receive the necessary strength from Heaven.”