RIP Pope Francis, the public servant who drove Vatican tailors crazy with his 'papal athleisure'

“I don’t exclude the possibility that in the evening he just puts [his cassock] to wash, and wears it again the next morning."

Pope Francis spent his final days — after being hospitalized for double pneumonia in March — advocating for the poor and downtrodden. He dispatched his second-in-command to give US vice president J.D. Vance a “lecture on compassion,” regarding the Trump administration’s cruelty toward migrants, and used the Easter Mass to call for a cease fire in Gaza. Throughout his tenure, he lectured on the importance of protecting our planet and the urgency of the climate crisis. He died Monday of a stroke and heart failure at the age of 88.

Pope Francis scaled back much of the glitz associated with the papacy — eschewing the bling, the velvets, the ermine trims embraced by his predecessor. While many cheered this change, some “fashion-conscious Italians,” according to the Catholic news site Crux, bemoaned Francis’s “papal athleisure.” (Vatican insiders nearly fainted when they saw him out in public with a torn sleeve. One tailor — after insinuating that the pontiff’s ascetic leanings were bad for business — sighed: “I don’t exclude the possibility that in the evening he just puts [his cassock] to wash, and wears it again the next morning.”)

Yet, the art historian Anne Higonnet noted that Francis’s garb, while simple, had the illuminating aura of the divine.

“Pope Francis is pulling away from the magnificent toward a new combo of angelic and monastic,” she told me for a story I did for The New York Post, ahead of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. “He wears all white, but not layered with all the gold and jewels.”

Pope Francis used the plain wool cassock the way, say, President Zelensky of Ukraine has adopted military-style cargo pants and sweatshirts: to signal solidarity with his people, to say he is one of them, to say that he doesn’t need the trappings of authority to assert his authority or his moral clarity. That is not to say that their costumes are inauthentic. One gets the sense that Francis never liked playing dress-up, that his neck would have chafed under the weight of numerous bejeweled pendants, that he would have squirmed under all the brocaded capes and embroidered vestments. But he also understood the symbolism of publicly shunning such frippery. By dressing like everyone else — or like the most humble servants of God — he stood out.

Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce as Cardinal Bergoglio in The Two Popes. Peter Mountain/Netflix

How the Papal Fashion in ‘The Two Popes’ tells a secret story

I was astounded going back through my archives that I had written not one, not two, but three articles touching on Pope Francis’s dress for The New York Post. Below is one I did about the costumes for the film The Two Popes, which imagined the real-life meeting between Francis (played by the wonderful Jonathan Pryce) and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins), and which was actually better than it had any right to be …

This story initially ran in the New York Post on Nov. 27, 2019

“The Two Popes” may be about two old white dudes, but its costumes are as splashy as J.Lo’s furs in “Hustlers.”

The film — now in theaters and on Netflix Dec. 20 — was inspired by real life and features Anthony Hopkins as the flashy Pope Benedict XVI and Jonathan Pryce as his shabby-chic successor, Pope Francis. Throughout the movie, the dueling pontiffs argue about the role of the church, homosexuality and politics — but their clothes do a lot of the talking.

Benedict radiates luxury in red silk, lace and emeralds, while Francis shuffles about in scuffed black Oxfords.

“I tried to be as faithful as possible to reality,” Luca Canfora, the movie’s costume designer, told The Post in Italian via e-mail. “The two popes have very different styles … and their [clothes] highlight their distinct personalities and philosophies.”

While the standard papal uniform coalesced around the year 1000 A.D., each pope has tweaked the formula, according to fashion historian Daniel James Cole.

The piling on or pulling back on the papal bling “is emblematic of the personal choices of the pope,” says Cole, co-author of “The History of Modern Fashion,” who is working on a book on religious garb. “It’s a combination of individual tastes and the politics of the time,” he adds.

In the early days of Christianity, there was no formal church, and those who followed the teachings of the prophet Jesus wore simple, undyed clothes. Clerics wore what everyone else wore.

Later, as Christianity became a more organized religion, the clergy began using colors to distinguish between different orders (priests, monks, cardinals). By about 1000 A.D., the pope’s uniform evolved into the standard white cassock and miniature cape (called a mozzetta) we see today.

The ostentatious gold cloaks, jeweled crosses and ermine-trimmed velvet capelets emerged in the late Middle Ages. And in the 1300s, Benedict XI introduced a triple crown to the pope’s costume.

“Once that kind of opulence got there, it just kind of stayed there,” says Cole.

Even in the 1940s, during World War II, the pope — Pius XII — wore gold-embroidered cloaks and sparkling headgear.

“Pius XII was very much in tune with the spectacle of fascist Italy,” says Cole. “You see him in photographs where he’s wearing the papal tiara or he’s wearing some big fabulous coat or cloak.”

In 1964, Pope Paul VI, known for his reserved personality, retired the triple-tiered tiara.

“He considered the papal tiara with all its jewel encrustation as perhaps sending a bad message if the pope was supposed to be concerned with poverty,” says Cole.

Pope John Paul II further advanced the image of the pontiff by favoring more modern touches, like white Doc Martens. He even took to carrying a briefcase.

“It’s a very useful expression of modernity,” Cole says of the accessory. “Like, of course the pope is gonna need a briefcase!”

Benedict, known as a hard-line traditionalist, sought to restore some old glamour of the church: the fur trims, the rich velvet, the red shoes. “He would sometimes use precious vestments worn by popes from the past centuries,” says Canfora, who also did the costumes for HBO’s “The Young Pope.”

When Francis assumed the papacy in 2013, at age 76, much was made of his sober style. The Catholic Web site Crux dubbed his linen cassocks, unadorned shawls and simple wooden crosses “papal athleisure.” One Vatican tailor even opined that his clothes were “maybe too plain,” particularly after the sartorial splendor of Benedict.

But if Francis doesn’t look as fabulous as Benedict, who was 86 in 2013, he has displayed a sartorial savvy that eluded his predecessor.

“Francis is being a pope for the modern world,” says Cole. And that world is more democratic, more down-to-earth and more open.

“The fact that he wears the black shoes instead of red shoes is a microcosm of that,” Cole adds. “It’s only shoes, but it kind of does sum up a lot.”