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| Slightly more reasonable instructions here |
There are two books which many Catholics may come across which deal with the subject of dress. The first,
Immodesty: Satan's Virtue by Rita Davidson comes from a tough SSPX perspective. It is not very well written, and that interferes with its main thesis, which is that modesty is an absolute requirement for Catholics, and this should be interpreted very strictly. No trousers for women, no low necklines, skirts ankle length and hair preferably long.
The second, much better put together, is
Dressing with Dignity by Colleen Hammond. She is more shrewd than Rita Davidson and much more careful in her manner of expressing herself throughout the book. However, in the final chapter where she attempts to give her readers some practical advice on how to apply her ideas, her philosophy basically collapses into the
Satan's Virtue one, and she ends up giving similar guidelines, though perhaps not quite so strict: necklines no more than two fingers below the base of the throat, skirts to cover knees even when the wearer is seated and so on.
There is a argument underlying these books which needs to be brought out into the light for examination. It is that since
modesty is an obligation on
everyone at all times (since the Fall), then fulfilling this obligation must be done in the same way
for everyone at all times. In other words, it must involve ticking the same boxes, about exactly what is covered, regardless of social or cultural context. What is immodest in one social and cultural context is immodest in all. What would have seemed immodest to Our Lady, should be avoided by us today. The cultural changes of the last century do not lower the requirements. And - the logical conclusion of this attitude - what would be immodest at a funeral Mass would be immodest on the beach.
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| What happens when Catholics wear uniform |
This creates the dilemma that I have seen in numerous discussion forums when the subject is being debated. The more hard-core traditionalists want to draw up rules for what they call a "Mary-like" dress, and these are often as exigent as Rita Davidson's. Others acknowledge the difficulty of applying rules unilaterally, especially in the context of enormous historical and cultural variation. They point out, for example, that St Clare of Assisi going barefoot was not immodest
for her, though it would have shocked people in other eras. To the more rigorist, this looks dangerously like saying that the obligation of modesty is
itself varying according to the cultural norms of the day. And what happens if, as today, the cultural norms are depraved? Furthermore, they challenge their opponents to specify exactly what they would allow. At best this means that each person ends up with his own rulebook.
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| Balenciaga Jacket and skirt suit, 1957 |
I have enormous sympathy with everyone involved in this struggle. It's something which everyone, even the most uninterested, must form an opinion on, as we all have to get dressed each morning. Getting it wrong seems a terrible thing, especially if you read some of the more hair-raising of
Padre Pio's comments on the subject, and yet the Church gives very little practical guidance on the matter, beyond saying that modesty is important.
But that lack of guidance is itself a clue. Attempts to describe a "Mary-like" dress, or to form guidelines about dress, cannot be described as authoritative and should indeed be treated with the utmost caution. For Catholicism is not a uniformed religion. As Thomas Aquinas
puts it, quoting St Ambrose, "Dress should not conflict too gaudily with established custom, provided the custom itself is decent."
This brief quotation suggests that we actually have two questions to bear in mind: the relationship of our dress to current customs, and the judgement of those customs themselves.
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The Master: the greatest couturier of the twentieth century
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First, the customs of the day provide us with a
language in which to express ourselves. We can put on clothes which express grief, a business-like seriousness, or joy: people will be able to tell at a glance which one we are aligning ourselves to today. Again, our clothing can suggest the tom-boy, the geek, the sloven, and the dandy. We can no more ignore what our clothing
means to our contemporaries, than what our words mean to our contemporaries. Just as we speak in an ever-evolving vernacular language, so we generally dress in an evolving vernacular clothing.
The second question is: do the standards of dress of our time conform to the timeless requirements of morality? By wearing clothes which are unusually un-revealing for our time, we may be making a statement about modesty to our contemporaries, but that does not guarantee in itself that we have gone far enough. There are absolute requirements of modesty, which are related to certain unchanging aspects of human nature. To take the extreme case, Naturism - complete nakedness - could never be acceptable, however much it might be culturally established in a particular time and place.
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| Balenciaga ballgown and stole, c 1952 |
Sometimes the two issues have been distinguished by saying that the second is about
modesty, the first about
pudicy. Pudicy is related to a sense of shame: of how one is seen by others, of respectability. The standards of pudicy are culturally variable; the minimum standards of modesty are undemanding, but unchanging. Our Lady would have been ashamed to appear in public without a veil: the standards of pudicy in her society were far more demanding than of later centuries, and we needn't try to follow hers.
What we find today, however, is not only a lowering of the standards of pudicy, but a conscious rejection of the notion of pudicy itself: of shame and respectability. Clothes which suggest sexual availability are no longer the preserve of prostitutes. Women are told that to be shameless is to be free. There are still standards of dress, of a kind, but as well as having the opportunity to make a statement, through our clothes, of an appropriate pudicy, we are under social pressure to make a statement of sexual liberation. If we refuse to do that, there will be people, under the influence of the modern ideology, who will accuse us of being hide-bound and old-fashioned. While we need not seek out such labels, we should be prepared to suffer them when necessary.
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| Balenciaga wedding dress |
This brings us neatly to the nub of the problem, which is that we are living in a culture in which - to revert to the normal terminology - immodest dress is not only permitted but encouraged. Today, Catholics have to go beyond the ordinary Western standard of decency; we have to establish our own rough and ready one. This means that there is great difficulty in finding appropriate clothes. It has also resulted in what I think is an excessive focus, by serious-minded Catholics, on the
modesty of clothes, when this is far from being the only consideration of importance when choosing what to wear.
For the reasons set out above it should be clear that starting by drawing up detailed rules for what to wear is a blind alley which we should avoid. How, then, should we approach the question? What we need to know is how a truly Catholic person, steeped in the Faith, but also with a profound knowledge and understanding of clothes, preferably from before the sexual revolution, would approach the question of dress. We are extraordinarily, indeed, I believe, Providentially, fortunate in having the ideal model for this. The greatest couturier of the golden age of couture, that is to say roughly the middle of the twentieth century, known universally as 'the Master', was a Spanish Catholic, born in 1898 and brought up in the era before the Revolution, who left his place of work twice each day to visit the Blessed Sacrament. His name was Cristobal Balenciaga, and in his remarkable output we can find the starting point for an understanding of how to dress. Not, to reiterate, that we necessarily want to ape his clothes (although there are worse things), but to understand his
attitude.
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| Jacket, 1957 |
The first thing one notices, studying his creations, is the extraordinary breadth of vision. Clothes for every occasion, and for many different types of women - there is no classifying his clothes with a single adjective. There is no apparent rule for hemlines, for instance: some gowns sweep the floor with magnificent trains while some suits are above the knee. The more one studies the clothes, however, the more one does notice certain patterns. The wedding dresses, for example, are much more modestly cut that the ball gowns. They have sleeves and high necklines, and are easily distinguished from the evening gowns which are often cut quite low, and are sleeveless. A suit with a short skirt will not have a low neckline. A low neckline on a cocktail gown will be complemented with a longer skirt, or sleeves. I do not think that Balenciaga necessarily considered these things consciously, and again we need to avoid the temptation to draw up rules based on his creations. However, I think that
and as he was completely focused on creating beauty his gowns were naturally not immodest.
