What To Wear To Meet The Pope
A question I’d like to be prepared for – should the church ever invite me to the Vatican after commissioning articles on the erotic potential of the crucifix – is what on earth one wears to meet the Pope. Because given that thevaticantickets.co.uk discourages caps, ripped jeans and T-shirts with offensive slogans – and therefore would likely disapprove of my comparing myself to Jesus because I wear sweatpants at Vogue – I’m not sure I’d make it past Piazza San Pietro without being escorted in the opposite direction.
It would have to be something conservative, I think, to show deference to the man at the helm, and the even bigger one above him. Perhaps something like the attenuated Louis Vuitton suit Cate Blanchett wore to meet Pope Leo XIV over the weekend, when he gathered an audience of stars from across the entertainment industry – among them Spike Lee, Viggo Mortensen and for some reason Chris Pine – in the Clementine Hall and encouraged them to continue their work as “pilgrims of the imagination”.
“Violence, poverty, exile, loneliness, addiction and forgotten wars are issues that need to be acknowledged and narrated,” the Pope said, in Italian. “Good cinema does not exploit pain; it recognises and explores it. This is what all the great directors have done.” Greta Gerwig wore a chequered coat-dress, while Monica Bellucci – who memorably portrayed Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ – went for a double-breasted Saint Laurent tuxedo with platforms.
It all seems part of the church’s efforts to reach out to the secular world, and raise the recently elected pontiff’s profile. I wonder if that might explain why recent Vogue bride TK Koroye-Crooks received a blessing from Pope Leo XIV followed by a meeting with the Cardinal known as “The Red Pope”, and finally a private mass for 40 of her closest family and friends in St Peter’s tomb beneath the Vatican, the day before her wedding this past summer. Now, I don’t think it would be appropriate, for me at least, to arrive in a Parent Trap-inspired Oscar de la Renta dress, but I might take inspiration from the Pope’s Letterboxd top four, which the Vatican revealed as being Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful and Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music. Yes, I’ve always suspected I have the physique for a nun’s habit.
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