Religious Fashion

Since the Pope is on his state visit in Britain this week, I thought it would be interesting to look at how religious dress has influenced current fashion and which designers are featuring religious inspired collections.

I start with a controversial piece of religious costume, the Burka. In the UK they are considering banning this item of clothing to be worn by Muslim women. But some brave designers have created some colourful Burkas.

Marked Moskva

Louise Golden

To add to the controversy of the Burka, Hussein Chalayan decided to de construct the Burka into a literally bare form, you can see below that Burkas can hide any shape, size, or coloured women underneath all that cloth.

Hussein Chalayan spring/summer 1998

Givenchy Haute Couture fall 2009

Although Moskva and Chalayan contradict the whole reason why Muslim women wear Burkas, it's still nice to see that people are willing to challenge strict religious costume. 

Religion has been around for so long that it must be time for religious costume to come back into fashion. Religious dress in the past has always been long skirts embroidered with avant-garde stitching.

Alexander Mcqueen gold leaf embroidered dress

Alexander Mcqueen

The last thing that i think is coming back is religious jewellery. Apart from the religious reasons for wearing crucifix's, there could be a big market appearing for kooky and unique Christian jewellery, if Tiffany have such wonderful crucifix's as below, then who wouldn't want to be wearing crosses.

I hope that religion and fashion can flourish together, but many people might not understand the reasons for religions having specific clothes to wear. Which perhaps needs to be explained.

Any thoughts, I would love to hear them, and thank you to all my twitter followers for helping me to reach my 100 hits mark!