“What does American Christianity look like if we shift our attention to fashion sources?” (10). Neal answers largely with Vogue magazine and runway fashion since World War II. She hopes to dispel the dichotomy between fashion as “material, silly, and superficial” and religion as “spiritual, serious, and substantive” (7). Her term “fashionable religion” includes clothing with religious references and whatever religious content she found in magazines better known for featuring clothing trends (14). Fashionable religion was largely religious seeking, according to Neal, who uses Robert Wuthnow's characterization of the 1950s as a time of religious dwelling and of the 1960s and after as a time of religious seeking. She argues editors and designers since the 1950s combined liberal Protestantism with the rich material culture of Catholicism and thus encouraged the “decontextualization of religious symbols,” an effort that suited an American public coming to prefer DIY spirituality (15).

I read of “numerous instances of religiously oriented articles, images, symbols and apparel,” chided myself on missing so much while researching The Lost Art of Dress (Basic Books, 2014), and opened a 1954 Vogue issue to look again (3). A hundred pages in, I realized “gunmetal mink” came up more often than vague angelic and celestial metaphors. Indeed, “religious-oriented articles” only appeared “at least annually” in the 1940s through the 1960s (20). Although Neal chides historians of fashion and of religion for missing fashionable religion, modern fashion discourse was and is overwhelmingly secular. Religious motifs have appeared in cycles, increasingly over time, yet remain rare. This may be an example of the perils of Proquest providing the searchable Vogue Archive; what looms large in word searches can shrink to insignificance in context. Late in the book, Neal admits she did not find what she expected: “Plentiful examples in the past” of “garments adorned with religious symbols and figures” (157).

Numerous shifts in the late 1960s, noted by dress historians, explain why such garments, the most convincing examples of Neal's fashionable religion, arrived only in the very late twentieth century. Early in the century, young women were taught the art of dress, which had some roots in religious understanding of the nature of creation. The 1960s cultural Youth Quake rejected such art rules, including that an applied motif must be stylized (think the Macintosh rose versus a photograph) and that dress design should emphasize the wearer's face. Make way for Jesus on a skirt. Since the 1970s, runway shows evolved from salon presentations for select audiences to theatrical marketing circuses meant to generate attention for the only profitable fashion products: ready-to-wear, perfume, accessories, etc. When Jean Paul Gaultier put nun's coifs on models wearing dresses slit up the thigh to expose garter belts in 1989, he was shocked, shocked to have offended. Neal does not take him at his word, but “his rationale”—a Catholic upbringing—“emphasizes a personalized way of seeing Christianity” (145). Or was the show meant to generate publicity and perfume sales?

Those few early feature articles Neal finds promoted “sensory experience and spiritual transcendence” without “excessive emotionalism or irrationality—traits implicitly deemed unsophisticated” (22). Drawing upon traditional Catholic aesthetics, writers offered the sophisticated reader access to a kind of primitive yet authentic experience. “Sophistication” means here some knowledge of various religious traditions and their artistic elements with less concern for theological specificity. Neal insists this is not superficiality and does not want to judge the quality of beliefs of “spiritual tourists” (109). Advertisements from the era “made over Christianity into a more playful, permissive, and stylish faith that could transform your life through the purchasing of products” instead of piety (69). Crosses as fashion accessories in Vogue “primed reader-consumers to see the Christian heritage in bits and pieces . . . and to view fashion products as powerful supernaturally charged sacred objects” (89). Yet contemporary fashion writers did not notice the religious origins of the only early example: the Maltese Cross on Chanel jewelry in the 1930s and 1950s. I suspect its design, so unlike the Latin cross, explains why. Crosses became a fad: five appearances annually in fashion spreads from 1960 to 1965, and more than ten from 1967 to 1968. While magazine editors rarely commented on these placements, a journalist wrote in 1969 that crosses, “astrology and witches,” appealed to the spiritual seeker “in the age of Aquarius” (105, 103). When evangelicals wore crosses in the next two decades, the fashionable avoided them at first only to return to them in the 1990s when pop star Madonna wore one while dancing in her underwear. Clothing with religious-style elements also arrived in this later period, although Neal relegates to a footnote the best-known early example—Claire McCardell's Monastic Dress (1938)—which cannot support her chronological argument. Its popularity was attributed to its universally flattering cut, by the way. Which leaves Neal one collection in the fall 1956–1957 season with some obvious Catholic references, some subtle ones by Balenciaga in the 1960s, and two mini-dress nun's habits by a forgotten designer in 1968. Only decades later does more than one such example occur in the same fashion season, and they never dominate. Such efforts “accustomed people to extracting religious symbols, visual cues and material form from the Christian past” to use as they liked (139).

Neal attributes such rummaging through religious traditions in part to the pressure of the seasonal fashion cycle. Which raises the question: does women's fashion ever dwell? Long-term style trends dominate a decade (think short skirts in the 1920s), but fads come and go quickly in order to sell what is not already in women's closets. Elizabeth Hawes complained in the 1930s of the impossibility of designing fashion novelties well under pressure. Seeking is the fashion business. Neal references R. Lawrence Moore's Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994) and Colleen McDannell's Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (Yale University Press, 1995) on consumption and religion. I thought of Leigh Schmidt's Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton University Press, 1995) and how his analysis of the “peddling of festivity” offers insights into the wider religious/consumer discourse that Vogue readers encountered outside its pages and the common ways in which God and mammon have always shared market space.