Cross words: how fashion is reappropriating the Christian cross

As the Christian cross becomes ever more on-trend, the Archbishop of Canterbury asks: would we wear a gold electric chair around our necks? But he couldn’t be more wrong about fashion’s crush on the crucifix, argues Stephen Bayley
Stephen Bayley20 December 2013

I am looking at an elegantly thin man with close-cropped hair and an on-trend aspect of brainy anxiousness. He is wearing an androgynous outfit of brocade and damask richly crusted with stand-out jewellery, some of it apparently Christian in origin. Am I looking at the preening star of a fashion video? Or is it the Archbishop of Canterbury? If we squint, it appears to be the Archbishop. Justin Welby has, in a well-publicised foreword to a new book by Graham Tomlin, a one-time Oxford don who is now a member of the Church of England’s College of Evangelists sales team, lamented that fashion has robbed the cross of its power. Personally, I don’t think anything of the sort.

True, motifs from Christian art are popping up with the speed once associated with high-concept temporary restaurants. In the US, Nordstrom will sell you stained-glass-patterned leggings. Over here, Topshop will sell you T-shirts with inverted crosses (which scholars will tell you is St Peter’s Cross because he was crucified upside-down). Dolce & Gabbana has a handbag with a design inspired by mosaics lifted from the Byzantine churches of Ravenna. And the sacred cross is suddenly everywhere.

Why is the Archbishop so miserable about this? If you asked an image consultant what it meant that Christian signs and symbols are cool, that hipsters have adopted the cross, that priests in fashion videos look hot, he would say it is an amazing strength with a cash value perhaps nudging the Church of England’s chubby property portfolio.

Yet for all the world the Archbishop looks like the demoralised CEO of a failing FTSE 100 company that has lost control of its markets. The share price is on the slide. Brand values are being diluted by pirates, but the lacklustre management does not have a fix.

Meanwhile, outside the sparse and foetid congregations, the cross has become a powerful badge of fresh rebellion. But not one that the Church of England is ready to recognise, still less enjoy. Instead, a significant trend is dismissed as banal and lowering, even godless. I am very sorry, Your Grace, but fashion and sex have always been part of the Church’s story. And so, too, has branding.

The Christian church was, from the first, an exercise in corporate identity. There was a marketing plan, soundbites and a logo. It was founded in circumstances that Gibbon described as the ‘open violence’ and ‘slow decay’ of the Roman Empire. A muddled Emperor Constantine had seen a meteor fall on the Abruzzo the night before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, took it as a divine message and made his troops carry the Chi-Rho (the first Greek letters of the name Christ). The year after, in 313 AD, the Edict of Milan made the Empire Christian.

But the cross was not, at first, taken up as a logo because it too readily reminded people of death, torture and suffering. This is what the Archbishop refers to when he says it’s the equivalent of having a gold electric chair hanging around your neck. Quite so. Insensitive and crass. Your Grace is correct to deplore any trivialisation of the sublime religious mystery of life-death-resurrection, which the cross represents, but, on the other hand, Your Grace is missing a trick not to exploit an instinct for irreverence among smart folk.

Then there is sex. The architectural plan of the Christian church is a Latin cross. Many antiquarians believe that the features of this plan, with its porch, nave and altar, are a more-or-less conscious diagram of the female reproductive system. The precise analogy would be indelicate, but in this interpretation the altar is the source of life and the porch the entrance. Let’s not forget that Renaissance virgins are often shown in an almond-shaped device called a mandorla, a specific reference to the vulva. With this in mind, Versace showing a Byzantine cross on a catwalk last year seems tasteful.

Dr Welby’s argument is not clear. The cross is an ancient sign whose power long precedes Christianity. Cavemen carved crosses within circles, possibly to represent the traverse of the sun across the heavens. The notorious swastika is a cross that originated as a pre-Hindu good-luck sign. The ankh, or Coptic cross, evolved into the biological symbol for female. The three bars of the Papal cross suggest the Holy Father’s dominion over church, world and heaven.

In fashion, there are specific moments when the cross motif re-emerged from the pulpit, nave and sacristy and brazened its way into pop culture. The very first volume of Vogue edited by Anna Wintour was the November 1988 edition. Its cover was a Peter Lindbergh photograph of a model (curiously, an Israeli) wearing a Christian Lacroix jacket with a huge jewelled cross. Wintour later recalled that this sacrilegious and relaxed image signalled the end of Vogue’s old hieratic formalism.

The very next year, the video for Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’ featured stigmata and burning crosses. Of course, the very name Madonna, mother of God, is itself a calculated blasphemy. As if to prove it, the singer wore a cross on a necklace that drew attention to her cleavage. At about the same time, the rappers Nas and Biggie put away their simple gold rope chains and replaced them with gaudy crosses.

The Archbishop of Canterbury sees all of this as a problem, while it is more optimistically seen as a moment of opportunity. His critique of fashion draining the cross of its supernatural power does not distinguish between signs and symbols. The cross is both, but symbols and signs are not the same thing. A symbol is a motif that stands for something else, while a sign is more explicit.

So the cross carries an emphatic weight of symbolism: temporary agony and everlasting love, no less. But a sign is less encumbered than a symbol. The ironic uptake of the cross suggests a latent enthusiasm for its product that has long been neglected by an inward-looking Church management. I know this to be true because I have recently seen a biker atop a gurgling Harley with a Celtic cross picked out in studs on the dorsal region of his greasy Schott jacket. He may not be in a state of grace, nor perhaps a Biblical scholar, but he is saying something interesting about group identity.

Fashion is ever contrarian. British Airways begins telling crew not to wear conservative crosses at just the moment when fashion suggests they should. Fashion comes and goes, but as CS Lewis put it, God has no tenses. And while we may never know the mind of God, we can be pretty sure that He’s not much fussed about the popularity of cross-patterned tights on Oxford Street.

The Archbishop is bearing his own cross up a lonely Via Dolorosa. He looks glum because fashion has stolen the Church’s silver. It’s as if Coke gave away classic contour bottles to soft-drink rivals, or Apple distributed iPhone code for free. The popularity of the cross is not a travesty, it’s evidence of something significant. And a symbol of something complicated. Its absorption into fashion shows an insurrectionist spirit, a respect for a cause, an expression of belief and a need to identify with a group. Are not these a part of the Archbishop’s business?

Every day I walk past Church House in Westminster and see its terrible stale and lifeless bookstore. I see lanyard-wearing, conference-going clergy with their cheap shoes, bad haircuts and sad faces all talking in desultory mode to each other. Dear me, they do not look on the verge of salvation. Me, I’d be quite happy to find a vicar who looked and dressed like Tom Ford (a pioneer of fashion’s secular cross). People want things to believe in and if the Church cannot supply them, fashion will. That’s the crux of it. ES

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