Lynn S. Neal, Religion in Vogue: Christianity and Fashion in America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Religion in Vogue: Christianity and Fashion in America conceptualizes the interconnectedness of religion and fashion as a marketable tool in the industry with a singular focus on Christianity.The primary investigation takes a unique approach in exploring the question "how did God get on a dress?" (p. 1).Neal aims to uncover the ways Christianity has joined the fashion world and ultimately how religious symbols have become a part of mainstream Vogue fashion.The book focuses on providing a historical overview of the ways Christianity has claimed the centre of fashion inspiration, and through content analysis, explores the content produced by fashion magazines from mid-1940s.In doing so, "fashionable religion" has become a basis of artistic exploration by both small and renowned designers through the separation of traditional ways of understanding religious symbols as a performative practice.The book explores a common theme of conceptualizing fashionable religion.The term fashionable religion emphasizes how appealing aspects of religion can separate the spheres of religiosity and spirituality as malleable concepts.The chapters chronologically follow a historical overview of how Christianity is depicted in mainstream fashion starting from the mid-twentieth century.Chapter 1's "Designing New Ways of Seeing Christianity" explores how fashion magazines (from mid 1940s-1960s) portray Christian religious identity as a completely separate entity from traditional fundamentalism (p.20).Moving towards Chapter 2's "Making Over Christianity", Neal looks at how advertisements shape the perception of Christianity through visual and material symbols.In doing so, the interconnectedness of Christianity and fashion continue to divide the religious identity from its theological context as being "religious" and appeases the audiences to consuming religion (p.87).In Chapter 3, "Accessorizing the Cross" builds on the previous chapter but narrows its focus on the increased commercialization of religious symbols because these symbols now have become accessories.Neal argues that the cross has acquired new symbolism through its production.This new symbolism has shifted towards a paradox of identity and artistic expression that can either be mutually exclusive or interconnected.This shift highlights how symbols and identity are often interconnected but, in this context, it can be reduced as a performative action.Chapter 4's "Innovating Religious Dress" emphasizes the shift of the materialization of Christian symbols from accessories (such as necklaces and rings) towards garments.During the 1960s-1980s, this change can be observed as centralizing Christianity as an inspiration for art; for example, the embodiment of "being divine" without its tie to religious theology (p.118).Finally, Chapter 5's
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".