Fashion Theology

Robert Covolo

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781481312752
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

What is fashion? Where does it come from? Why has it come to permeate modern life?

In the last half century, questions like these have drawn serious academic reflection, resulting in a new field of research—fashion studies—and generating a rich multidisciplinary discussion. Yet theology's voice has been conspicuously absent in this conversation. The time has finally come for theology to break her silence and join this decades-long conversation.

Fashion Theology is the first of its kind: a serious and long-overdue account of the dynamic relationship between theology and fashion. Chronicling the epic journey from ancient Christian sources to current developments in fashion studies, cultural theologian Robert Covolo navigates the rich history of Christian thought as well as recent political, social, aesthetic, literary, and performance theory. Far from mere disparity or quick resolution, Covolo demonstrates that fashion and theology inhabit a mutual terrain that has, until recently, scarcely been imagined.

Covolo retraces the way theologians have taken up fashion across history, unveiling how Christian thinkers have been fascinated with fashion well before the academy's current focus, and bringing these insights into the conversation with fashion itself: the logic by which fashion operates, how fashion shapes our world, and the way fashion imperceptibly molds our personal lives. Within fashion's realms reside some of life's greatest challenges: the foundations of political power, the basis for social order, the nature of aesthetics, how we inhabit time, and the means by which we tell stories about our lives—challenges, it turns out, that theologians also explore.

Fashion favors the bold; theology demands humility. Holding the two together, Fashion Theology trailblazes an interdisciplinary path informed by a thoughtful engagement with the Christian witness. For those traversing this spectacle of unexpected crossroads and hotly contested terrain, the promise of fashion theology awaits with its myriad unexplored vistas.

Notes

I. Fashion Theology as Tradition

1 Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante, eds., The World of Roman Costume (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); A. T. Croom, Roman Clothing and Fashion (Charleston, S.C.: Tempus, 2002); Liza Cleland, Mary Harlow, and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, The Clothed Body in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxbow, 2005); Jonathan Edmondson and Allison Keith, eds., Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); and Kelly Olson, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society (London: Routledge, 2008).

2 Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion, 2006), 19–22.

3 Kristi Upson-Saia, Early Christian Dress: Gender, Virtue, and Authority (New York: Routledge, 2011), 33–58; Carly Daniel-Hughes, The Salvation of the Flesh in Tertullian of Carthage: Dressing for the Resurrection (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 15–44.

4 Matt 6:25 reads, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?” (NIV).

5 Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 264.

6 “As, then, in the fashioning of our clothes, we must keep clear of all strangeness, so in the use of them we must beware of extravagance. For neither is it seemly for the clothes to be above the knee . . . nor is it becoming for any part of a woman to be exposed.” Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, 266.

7 Ambrose, On the Duties of Clergy, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 10, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 15.

8 Aideen M. Hartney, “Dedicated Followers of Fashion: John Chrysostom on Female Dress,” in Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World, ed. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (London: Duckworth, 2002), 243–58.

9 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 14, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 496. Chrysostom also takes up dress in his homily on 1 Timothy 2:8-10, wherein he states, “Paul discourses much of dress and much of modesty. And if he would remove those things which are only the indications of wealth, as gold, and pearls, and costly array; how much more those things which imply studied ornament, as painting, coloring the eyes, a mincing gait, the affected voice, a languishing and wanton look; the exquisite care in putting on the cloak and bodice, the nicely wrought girdle, and the closely-fitting shoes?” John Chrysostom, Homilies on Timothy, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 433. For Chrysostom’s critique of the making and wearing of luxury clothing items, see John Chrysostom, The Gospel of St. Matthew, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 10, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 307–9.

10 Jerome, for example, also had a number of warnings about women guilty of “cramming their wardrobes with dresses, changing their gowns from day to day” and men who “think of nothing but their dress; they use perfumes freely, and see that there are no creases in their leather shoes.” Jerome calls these ancient fashion slaves to trade in their fastidiousness for a less expensive, unadorned dress that is “neither too neat nor too slovenly.” Jerome, The Letters of St. Jerome in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 29, 34, 36, 48, 254, 262, 263.

11 According to some, Tertullian is the most important Christian writer in the West before Augustine. See W. Le Saint’s “Tertullian,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14, ed. the editorial staff at the Catholic University of America (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), 1019.

12 Two notable exceptions include Alicia Batten, “The Carthaginian Critiques of Adornment,” Journal of Early Christian History 1, no. 1 (2011): 3–21; and Daniel-Hughes’ previously cited monograph, Salvation of the Flesh.

13 “You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skin?” Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women I, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 14.

14 Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 classic, Le deuxieme sexe (The Second Sex [New York: Knopf, 2010], 104), has directed generations of feminist scholars to this so-called gateway passage of Christian misogyny: George Tavard, Women in the Christian Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 59.

15 Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women II, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 20–21.

16 Here Tertullian sounds a proto-Marxian note: “It is only from their rarity and outlandishness that all these things possess their grace; in short, within their own native limits they are not held of so high worth.” Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women I, 17. Like Marx, Tertullian wanted to eliminate any subjective basis for the value of objects, ascertaining the purely “natural” value of an object. However, Tertullian parts company with Marx on exactly what that objective value is. Whereas Marx identifies the “natural” (objective) value of an object with the labor used to produce it, Tertullian identifies it with the intrinsic qualities and utilitarian value of the object (via divine creation) before labor is imposed on it. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2012), 7.

17 Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women I, 17.

18 The church father Cyprian of Carthage (ca. 200–258) offers a similar logic. As Cyprian crudely reasons, herbs and shellfish do not naturally dye cloth, stones set in gold are not native to creation, and we do not find pearls lined up like necklaces along the beach. See Cyprian, On the Dress of Virgins, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff et al. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2004), 430–37.

19 Tertullian, On the Ap...