Like A Prayer

An otherworldly selection of pieces from The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute’s biggest show ever, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” earns its hallelujahs.

- Maureen Dowd

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. 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. The blonde leaned over Wayne, spilling out of her bodice, and brandished a platter of chicken. “Now, what was your preference: the leg or the breast?” she drawled provocatively as Wayne squirmed. Without a word, the nuns stood up. They did not even look at us. We knew to get up and follow them, single file, out of the theater.

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. 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.

I can still recall the thrill I felt when, another year, the nuns said we could wear our own clothes to school one day, rather than our dull forest-green uniforms. And I still remember the ensuing humiliation when the nuns deemed my pink polka-dot minidress inappropriate. They made me kneel, and when the dress did not hit the floor, they told the student who lived nearest the school to take me to her house and lend me a dress. Unfortunately, she was a beanstalk of a girl and I was a shrimp, so my borrowed frock dragged along the ground, a train of shame. (My older sister had to go to the nuns to get her prom dresses approved; they were determined to ward off any bold, brazen attempts at strapless.)