Clothing has never been neutral. Every garment anyone has ever put on says something about who they take themselves to be, and most of the time we do that unconsciously. Devotional clothing just makes the saying explicit, which is why it makes people uncomfortable.
The oldest version of this
Wearing a conviction is not a modern idea and it did not start with slogan tees. Pilgrims returning from Santiago de Compostela wore a scallop shell. Crusaders wore a cross sewn to the shoulder. Monastic orders are identifiable at fifty paces by the colour and cut of a habit, and that was the point — the garment announced a commitment before the wearer said a word.
What all of those have in common is that the garment was a consequence of something rather than a substitute for it. Nobody put on a habit in order to become a monk.
The obvious objection
There is a passage that gets quoted at anyone who makes devotional apparel, and it is worth taking seriously rather than deflecting: the warning against practising your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.
It is a real tension. A garment that exists to advertise your own goodness is doing precisely what that passage warns against, and a great deal of religious merchandise is doing exactly that. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
The distinction we work with is between a garment as announcement and a garment as reminder. An announcement is aimed outward and its purpose is how you are perceived. A reminder is aimed inward and its purpose is that you notice it while getting dressed. The same object can be either, depending entirely on the person wearing it, which means this is not something design can settle.
What design can do is make the second reading easier. Which is most of what we try to do.
Why our work is hard to read
People occasionally point out that our blackletter takes effort to decipher, as though this were an oversight.
It is not. A garment you can read across a car park is functioning as a billboard. A garment that takes a moment — that someone has to step closer and actually look at — is functioning as an invitation to a conversation, or as something the wearer knows and a stranger might not.
Legibility is a design decision with a moral shape to it. We choose the slower one deliberately.
The other failure mode
If one failure is the billboard, the other is the costume — devotional imagery worn purely as aesthetic, with no relationship to what it means.
We are less worried about this than you might expect, for two reasons. First, we are in no position to audit anyone’s interior life, and any brand that claims to be doing so is lying. Second, the tradition itself is fairly relaxed about this: religious imagery has always circulated wider than religious commitment, and images have a habit of working on people slowly and without permission.
Someone who buys a piece for the aesthetic and finds themselves, two years later, actually thinking about it has not done anything wrong. That is closer to how this has always worked than the tidy alternative.
Three questions worth asking
Not rules. Just what we ask ourselves before a design gets printed, and what might be useful before you wear one.
- Who is this for? If the honest answer is “so people see me wearing it”, that is worth noticing. Not necessarily fatal, but worth noticing.
- Would you still want it if nobody could see the print? If yes, it is doing the reminder job.
- Does it make a claim about you, or about the thing? “I am devout” and “this matters” are different sentences. The second one wears better.
Where we land
We make objects that are meant to be lived in — worn to work, worn badly, worn until the print softens and the cuffs go. Not display pieces. The whole argument for putting a conviction on a garment rather than a poster is that a garment goes with you into ordinary days, and ordinary days are where convictions actually get tested.
That is the intention, anyway. What anyone does with it afterwards is properly their own business.