As returning vacationers empty their mailboxes of fall department store catalogues and glossy magazines, they may well wonder whether the financially strained fashion industry is seeking salvation from above. The fashionable woman is pictured cloaked in a shroud, shod in high-laced boots worthy of Chaucer's pilgrims and draped in a clutch of crosses.


It isn't just Christianity's symbol that is being fervently appropriated. Runways, fashion advertisements and magazine layouts are rife with what could be the wardrobe at a religious summit meeting: Hare Krishna silks, hooded and rope-belted monks' robes, clerical tunics, the plain garb of the Amish and even the black gabardines of the Hasidic Jews. Nothing, it seems, is sacred.
Fashion designers, always adept at rationalizing their latest fixation, insist that beneath the multidigit price tags and status labels lies a bona fide message of spirituality. An Age of Self-Denial
"We are in a period of being more humble, of spending less, of being more frugal," said Robert Lee Morris, a jewelry designer whose use of the cross helped spark the trend. "These crosses just emphasize that sense of self-denial. Also, there's the AIDS crisis. Literally, we're keeping our pants up, and holding back -- using our will power to control that hedonism we had in the 80's."
Calvin Klein, who pared his models down like initiates to a couture convent, and whose Eternity perfume is closed with a cross-shaped stopper, said: "I look at the robes that are worn in the clergy, or the pristine white shirts that choirboys wear, or the way the Amish dress, and it all comes together for me."


Yet it is not difficult to see why some scholars of both fashion and religion are skeptical. Especially when the messages of religious garb -- uniformity, chastity, regimented social station -- are so markedly at odds with the goals of the modern fashion industry. That industry's real religion is change; religious dress demands adherence to tradition.


"Clothes that look simple and plain seem like a good effort to respond to society in this depression," said Katell le Bourhis, director and conservator in chief at the Musee des Arts de la Mode et du Textile, at the Louvre. "But it's a misconception, because those clothes are the same price as the extravagant ones." Troubled by the Context


While monastic dress may be a more reverential backdrop for the cross than Madonna's ear lobe and torso, theologians fear that its use as a mere fashion accessory will probably have the same profane effect.


"The way to discount a symbol is not to walk away from it and ignore it, but place it in a decorative context rather than religious context," said Margaret R. Miles, the Bussey Professor of Historical Theology at Harvard University Divinity School. "I regret that the religious symbolism is being trivialized and secularized in this way."


But fashion loves to seize movements of the moment, and religion has marched into the forefront. The rituals and rigors of the 90's are all about recovery from 80's excesses, be it an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or a jail term for insider trading. Monastic dressing is fashion's little penance.
"There is a heightened awareness we all have that religion is surprisingly an issue in people's lives in the latter years of the 20th century," said Richard Martin, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "What is the most secular time in history turns out to have major religious wars, and minor religious wars that occur even in the city of New York." He added, "Fashion designers are looking at cultural diversity in the same way as sociologists, looking at signs of differentiation, not the melting pot." Not 'a Religious Signature'


The designer Donna Karan pushed crosses with conviction this season, chains slung across the model's bodies and tight chokers protecting pale thin necks. "People said, 'How can a nice Jewish girl do a cross?' " she said. "I don't see it as a religious signature."


She said the spiritual aspect was only "a calming of the clothes, the antithesis of the hardness of power dressing," but added: "There is an imbalance in the world, a lot of anger and fear. So when you sense that, you try to look into your spiritual self."


How does all this soft sell play in a tough economy? The cover of Saks Fifth Avenue's fall catalogue is a somber high-necked dress by Ms. Karan, accessorized with a cross. Rose Marie Bravo, president of the store, said the dress, and several lower-priced copies, have been best sellers.


"But we have gotten a few letters asking, 'What is the significance of the cross?' " she said. "It's not the easiest look for the consumer, and I think it's gone a bit overboard."


The Neiman Marcus fall catalogue contains more than 50 crosses in its 150 pages. "We've gotten no adverse reaction," said Joan Kaner, senior vice president and fashion director, of the catalogue, which has just arrived in homes. "We do not look at this as religious symbolism. Like many of the designers who use crosses on the runway, we feel it fits the monastic clothes." Reflecting Religious Change


As much as the look says about the fashion industry's current cult of spirituality, it also reflects the waning of religious uniforms.


"Many communities have changed what was traditionally called a habit," said Sister Catherine Quinn, co-vicar for religious of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, who added that those garments were adapted from European widows' wear. She said that, in particular, the women in religious orders took the call for renewal in the 1960's by the Second Vatican Council as an occasion to modernize attire typically imposed by male church leaders.       


The disappearance of the habit from daily life, and the nostalgia that may evoke, could be reasons that designers feel free both to adapt and to sample it.


But even if it lacks the deliberate provocation of Madonna's gyrations with the rosary, and heavy-metal bands' cross-shaped tattoos, drawing from religion can still offend. Which is exactly what happened last spring when the designer Jean-Paul Gaultier accessorized his black wool suits with the trappings of Hasidic Jews. French Vogue recently photographed the clothes in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, rekindling the animosity. Unlike the nun's habit, this form of dress is still in daily use in a community whose tensions neither the designer nor the magazine were able to understand.


By its very nature, though, fashion is provocative, since one of its functions is to create sexual allure. The allure of the pure, from baby-doll dresses to waif models, is a recurring theme in fashion collections. 'Nothing Sexier Than a Monk'


The designer John Bartlett created a rope-belted monk's coat last season, which will be carried by Charivari, Bergdorf Goodman and Barney's New York and was recently bought by the actor Robin Williams. And this season Mr. Bartlett went Hare Krishna, with loose orange robes. "Personally speaking, there's nothing sexier than a monk or a Hare Krishna," he said. "They're so inaccessible."
Right now, particularly in the fashion business, representations of sexuality have been hugely complicated by the devastation wrought by AIDS. Somewhere along the way to the fancy-dress benefit, the paradox struck: what fancy dress suits a benefit designed to raise money to fight a cause regularly diminishing the guest list?


"On some level, these garments may be commenting on a sexual environment that for more than a decade has been dominated by the shadow of AIDS," said Nina Felshin, an independent curator and writer. "At the same time, because religious garb tends to be sexually ambiguous, as a fashion statement it continues our popular culture's questioning of fixed gender and of gender roles. As weird as it may sound, I think it is not very far removed from cross-dressing transvestism and androgyny."
There is also the underlying tension of waif-like virginal models being cast into the decadence of a material world. "In 19th-century brothels in Paris, the hookers wore a lot of costumes, and nun costumes and bridal costumes were the two most popular," said Dr. Valerie Steele, who is the author of "Fashion and Eroticism" (Oxford University Press, 1985) and who is working on a book on fettishism and fashion. "It's easy for us to confuse purity of line -- no ruffles -- with spiritual purity. No one is wearing hair shirts. Religiousness has to do with belief and behavior.
"This is not that. It's about a look."


Find some designs, accessories, looks which were inspired by religion as referenced in this article and paste onto one word file page. Email to me with your name on it to print out or print out yourself and bring to class. This is due on May 13th. You can do this at home, in class, but please have by this date to me. Check with me that I received if you send before the 13th. There will be a brief quiz and discussion about the article on the 15th.