When Faith Meets Fashion: How Religion Became Part of What We Wear

Fashion has always been more than fabric, silhouettes and seasonal trends. What we wear can communicate where we come from, what communities we belong to and ,sometimes, what we believe. From the hijab and turban to crosses, rosaries and religious garments, clothing can transform faith from something internal to something visible.

The relationship between religion and fashion is hardly new. Yet, in recent years, the connection has become increasingly visible on runways, in popular culture and across the fashion industry. Designers have returned to religious imagery, while consumers have used clothing to negotiate identity, spirituality and belonging.

For Reina Lewis, Emerita Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion, the relationship deserves to be taken more seriously. Her research project, Fashion and the Embodied Expression of Belief, Worldview, and Religion, examines how religious, spiritual, philosophical and secular beliefs influence fashion choices and how fashion itself can become a means of communicating those beliefs.

Faith Is Something We Wear

Religion is often discussed as a matter of belief, but belief can also be lived through the body.

A cross necklace, a hijab, a turban, a kippah or religious jewelry can signal affiliation, devotion or belonging. Clothing can also establish distinctions between communities, communicate values and indicate how someone wishes to be perceived.

The Open University describes dress as one of the ways people express religious affiliation and distinguish themselves from other groups. Religious clothing can be part of everyday life, while more elaborate garments may mark ceremonies, rituals or positions of authority.

This makes fashion particularly powerful. Unlike a painting or an object displayed in a museum, clothing moves through everyday life with the person wearing it. It is intimate, physical and public at the same time.

In that sense, religion is not only something that is believed. It can also be something that is worn.

From Sacred Symbols to the Runway

Fashion's fascination with religion has taken many forms. Crosses, rosaries, clerical collars, robes, veils and other religious references have appeared repeatedly in contemporary collections.

In 2026, RUSSH identified a renewed fascination with religious imagery across fashion and popular culture. Rick Owens' Spring/Summer 2026 presentation, for example, placed models in water at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, creating imagery reminiscent of baptism. Elsewhere, designers incorporated crosses, prayer beads, religious robes and spiritual symbols into their collections.

The trend extends beyond Christianity. Tolu Coker incorporated Yoruba spiritual beads into her London Fashion Week presentation, while Gabriela Hearst's Spring/Summer 2026 collection drew on tarot imagery and the symbolism of the Major Arcana. These references demonstrate how fashion's relationship with spirituality stretches far beyond a single religious tradition.

Yet there is an important distinction between wearing religion and using religion as an aesthetic.

For someone who wears a hijab as part of their faith, for example, the garment is connected to identity and lived experience. For a designer who incorporates a religious symbol into a collection, the same object can become a visual reference detached from its original context.

That difference is where fashion's relationship with religion becomes complicated.

The Problem With Inspiration

Religious imagery can be visually powerful. It carries centuries of history, symbolism and cultural meaning, making it an attractive source of inspiration for designers.

But inspiration can easily become appropriation.

Lewis's research highlights the tension between fashion's commercial interest in diverse belief communities and the risk of accusations of religious appropriation. Her project examines questions of cultural ownership, custodianship and exchange within different fashion systems.

The issue becomes particularly complex when symbols belonging to minority, Indigenous or historically marginalized communities are removed from their cultural context and transformed into commodities.

A religious symbol is not necessarily just a decorative motif. For the person who wears it as part of their faith, it may represent family, history, devotion, resistance or belonging.

This is why the fashion industry increasingly faces questions not only about whether a religious reference looks beautiful, but about who is using it, where it comes from and what it means to the people who live with it.

Modest Fashion and the Reclaiming of Style

The relationship between religion and fashion isn't only about designers borrowing religious imagery. It is also about religious communities shaping fashion themselves.

The growth of modest fashion has challenged the idea that fashion and religious dress exist on opposite sides of the cultural spectrum. Rather than treating modesty as the absence of fashion, a growing industry has demonstrated that covered silhouettes can be contemporary, luxurious, experimental and deeply personal.

Lewis's paper follows the development of the cross-faith modest fashion industry across Europe, North America, Australia, the Middle East and North Africa, while also examining its expansion into other fashion markets.

This represents an important shift in the way religious dress is understood. Instead of being positioned outside mainstream fashion, religiously informed clothing can be viewed as part of the fashion system itself—with its own consumers, designers, markets and creative languages.

The Body as a Place of Belief

Perhaps the most interesting part of the relationship between religion and fashion is that both are deeply connected to the body.

Religion can establish ideas about how the body should be presented, covered, decorated or treated. Fashion, meanwhile, gives people tools to construct and communicate their appearance.

The two therefore inevitably intersect.

A garment can express modesty, devotion or belonging. It can also challenge expectations surrounding gender, sexuality or the public presentation of the body. And when religious clothing enters the fashion industry, those meanings can be negotiated, transformed or contested.

As RUSSH argues, fashion's connection to spirituality is not necessarily evidence of a return to organized religion. Instead, designers may be responding to a broader contemporary desire for ritual, meaning, transformation and connection at a time when traditional sources of collective meaning feel increasingly uncertain.

Beyond the Aesthetic

Religion's presence in fashion ultimately raises a question that goes beyond trends: what does it mean to make belief visible?

A piece of clothing can be beautiful and meaningful at the same time. It can function as a personal expression, a marker of community and a cultural object. However, when that same garment or symbol enters the commercial fashion system, its meaning can change.

The challenge for fashion is therefore not to remove religion from the runway, but to understand it beyond aesthetics.

Faith is not simply a mood board. It is a lived experience.

And perhaps that is why the relationship between religion and fashion continues to endure. Both ask us to consider how we present ourselves to the world—and how something as seemingly ordinary as getting dressed can reveal what we value, where we belong and, sometimes, what we believe.

XOXO, The Fashion Stock Market