I went back to "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" at the Met Fifth Avenue this morning, armed with insider scoops on the aims and curation of the exhibit. I carefully followed the prescribed route and noticed works I had missed last time I came. Yes there are 
extraordinary pieces beautifully displayed, always in some sort of conversation with the glorious "artworks" of the Byzantine and Medieval Galleries, but I still don't quite get it. Yves Saint Laurent dressing the Virgin of El Rocio (above) is one thing. Coco Chanel recreating a Byzantine pendant cross she received as a gift is another (left). But another again is its further circulation as described in the caption:
Just as pendant crosses were one of the most persistent forms of jewelry in Byzantium, serving as a marker of the wearer's faith, Chanel's versions were highly sought after by her clients, worn as a sign of loyalty to her particular brand of modernism.
Say whay? Sillier still is the "procession" of figures in flowing black, crimson and white (= priest, cardinal, pope, get it?), though the spectacular garments are as lascivious as their models in the "ecclesiastical fashion show" of Fellini's "Roma," on view nearby.
Service, devotion, homage, lampoon, travesty, sacrilege - all these have their place in the "Catholic imagination," and there's a showy haute couture in luxury devotional objects, as in this dance of death rosary. But the gothic and rather sadomasochistic works next to it surely lack
even the pretense of depth. What are they doing in a "sacristy"? There were pieces I liked - like the 1950s "Pretino" dress - but in general the show skims surfaces, gesturing at decadence but turning away in feigned chasteness (or gesturing at chastity but turning away in feigned decadence). There's surely a lot one might do with the queer Christianities at play here, from the homosocial worlds of celibate communities and the variously sordid things that happen beneath the robes of men in dresses to fantasies of and about Catholic schoolgirls and the sacerdotal dreams of designers.