There is something creepy in the spectacle of a secular, public institution exploiting the fantasies of high fashion to celebrate the wealth and power of a white, Christian, patriarchal institution with a long and well-documented history of abusing that power.

Do we really want to see clothes that cost as much as a Mercedes treated as sacred objects? If the fashions are mostly elaborate and enthralling, their magnificence diminishes nearby religious artefacts, which are barely lit at all. (More of the same is at the Cloisters.) Saint-adjacent, coiffed mannequins are lit in the beatific glow of an epiphany, when theyвЂ™re really glorifying wealth. Part of the problem is the theatrical installation designed by architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro within the MetвЂ™s Gothic, Byzantine and Lehman collections. No doubt there is some truth to that, but remember: when designers turned papal robes and priestly frocks into evening wear, it was mostly to subvert the source, not to respect it. The Costume Institute's curator Andrew Bolton claims that because many designers grew up in Catholic countries, it was the Church that inspired them. This is an exhibition desperate for a halo. T he marketing for Heavenly Bodies, the blockbuster show now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would have you believe it centers on a certain male opulence.The aesthetic relationship between. Wings-and cruciform patterns-are everywhere. Remember power shoulders? TheyвЂ™re back! Only here they are the silvery, bejewelled or diaphanous wings of human angels poised for a devil of a time. Yet these tapestried robes and monarchic miters, relegated to unadorned basement rooms of the Anna Wintour Costume Center, look almost dull compared to the often dazzling, occasionally immodest and sometimes gaudy gowns, capes, coats, dresses and black-on-black clerical garb by Galliano, McQueen, Versace et al, in the main body of the show upstairs. Inaugurated at a 33,000-a-plate gala attended by rich and famous people competing to be the best dressed in theme including Rihanna, dressed in a religious garb complete with a miter and Zendaya, clad in armor like Saint Joan of Arc Heavenly Bodies is slated to be the. It includes rare loans of luxe papal vestments and accessories from the Vatican that only underscore the point. Upon seeing the Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination exhibition here at the Metropolitan in New York, I could not help but recall my little cousin and the remark he made all those years ago.

At a preview before the 10 May opening, the show even received the blessing of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, who extolled the вЂњCatholic imaginationвЂќ, whatever that is, over the ingenuity of the designers.ДЄ sense of fealty to Church propaganda overwhelms the whole presentation, which has nothing to do with actual spirituality or belief in anything but material value. Yet sanctimony is what we get in Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (until 8 October), this springвЂ™s questionable exhibition from the Metropolitan Museum of ArtвЂ™s Costume Institute. But paradigmatic shifts in our culture generally come out of irreverence, not piety. Heaven knows fashion designers are no strangers to pontification.

Heavenly bodies at the met