PhotoROME — Movie buffs will remember the Great Hall of the Palazzo Colonna from the final scene of “Roman Holiday,” when Audrey Hepburn chose royal duty over love, leaving Gregory Peck brokenhearted. On Monday, the painting-lined gallery hosted royalty of a different sort, when some of fashion’s biggest names met with Vatican luminaries to preview the exhibit “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which will open at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 10. Ms. Wintour wore red and black, as did Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s de facto culture minister. Rewording the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s well-known phrase, “Man is what he eats,” Cardinal Ravasi said that the same was true of how man dresses. PhotoCardinal Ravasi noted that the liturgical vestment “represents above all the transcendent dimension, the dimension of the religious mystery, and that’s why it is ornate, because that which is divine is considered splendid, marvelous, sumptuous, grandiose.”

Source: New York Times February 26, 2018 21:45 UTC