The nun’s habit is far more than mere material. It is a sign of a nun’s renunciation of the world, a potent symbol of poverty, a declaration of humility, a mark of her chastity. It is also, according to my mother, who was a nun for 12 years, an absolute bugger to keep clean.
Those long sleeves and expanses of plain white linen could be so unforgiving near a plate of spag bol. Nevertheless, immaculate, outside and in, was what was required. Anything less and the mother superior would pop up, prod you, tell you you were a “dirty nun” and dispatch you to the laundry. And everyone knows how much fun Catholic laundries could be.
The title of this book about nuns’ costume is Looking Good. And indeed nuns, as anyone who has seen Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story will know, can look very good indeed; a well-cut wimple can be very flattering in an austere, unobtainable sort of way. However, that was not the habit’s point. “Looking Bad” would actually have been a much better title as one of its main purposes was to smother the form of what St Paul — not a writer likely to be confused with Kim Kardashian — called this body of death.
Somehow, the Pauline ideal didn’t quite take off. Almost as soon as it appeared the nun’s habit acquired an aesthetic appeal of its own — and still has it, as the existence of this incongruously fashionable book shows. Done in the clean lines of the “isotype” illustration style, this chic little volume is the sort of stocking-filler you can imagine young architects buying for each other, a perfect little something for them to pop in their Sandqvist backpack before they set off on their fixed-gear bikes for the day.
It was not ever thus. When the first monks and nuns turned their backs on the fleshpots of the Roman empire and set out to the deserts of Egypt, they had ideas on personal fashion unlikely to cut it in the coffee houses of east London. A habit, said early monastic literature, ought to be an offence against aestheticism: filthy, ancient, mended and ideally lice-infested. The perfect habit was one you could leave outside your cell for three days and no one would steal it. Cleanliness was not next to godliness, nor was anyone who could help it next to the godly — and certainly not downwind of them.
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The book takes the form of a sort of nun Top Trumps for the main orders. On each page there is a picture of each order’s habit, a description of its distinguishing marks and some (admittedly low-octane) vital statistics — date of foundation, the number of beads on that order’s rosaries, and so on. It is not, admittedly, the kind of book likely to be described as “indispensable” but it would nevertheless be satisfying to have at hand in the Vatican where, like rare birds, nuns flit past and you always find yourself wondering which breed they are.
Generally speaking, what you think of as a typical nun’s costume, as modelled by Hepburn, Maria in The Sound of Music and many a drunken fancy-dressgoer, is the habit of the nuns of the Order of St Benedict, one of the oldest and most influential orders. The habit is ancient, dating in some form back to the 6th century, but the white wimple has evolved over the centuries, becoming pleated, folded and in some houses even conical; a puritanical peacock’s tail.
“Early monastic literature said a habit should be filthy and ideally lice-infested
The black of the habit dates from the 12th century and symbolises the nun’s death to the material world. To further press home the point, until recently new nuns of the order would, on the day of their joining, lie face down on the church floor while the other nuns gathered round and sang the requiem hymn, the Dies Irae. The nun’s family would be sent a funeral pall as a memento of the daughter they had “lost”.
Other orders had similar initiation ceremonies; until the 1970s convents of the Order of St Clare in Italy (founded 1212; 70 Hail Mary beads on the rosary) used to keep a skeleton in store. The skeleton was known, with Biblical simplicity, as “Sister Death” and each novice was required, when she became a fully-fledged nun and changed out of her own clothes for the final time, to embrace the skeleton to remind her to “shed attachments to anything in this world and instead focus on salvation in the next”. A special day.
If this stylish book feels incongruous next to the original monastic habits well, then, so too were many of the original monastic habits. The order of St Bridget (founded 1344; 63 “Ave” beads on their rosaries) decorated their headdress with a crown inlaid with precious stones. The 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen encouraged some jazzy attire among her nuns, allowing them to wear multicoloured crowns, purple and gold robes and even make-up; if you were going to be a “bride of Christ”, she argued, you ought at least to look nice for him.
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An intriguing 6th-century law makes it clear that monastic dress has always had a niche appeal; it announced that “those persons, especially stage-players and harlots, who should assume the monastic dress” were unacceptable. As the law concludes with somewhat un-Christian vigour, such people were now to be punished with “bodily torments”.
However constricting nuns’ clothes might be, they were also, for many, a liberation. My mother became a “bride of Christ” partly because it seemed infinitely preferable to becoming an actual bride in postwar Glasgow. And however hard obeying the whims of a mother superior might be, it seemed to her to be infinitely preferable to the drudgery of being a mother and producing, cleaning and caring for the endless children that Catholicism required — still requires — of its women. True, a habit might hide your sex but it also, for the best part of 1,500 years, liberated you from it.
It might seem trivial to have an entire book devoted to nuns’ clothing when surely it is their deeds, or perhaps even their souls, that really matter. Yet however much one might like to pretend otherwise, what you wear matters. The hipsters know it. The early monks and nuns knew it. And my mother knew it. In the 1960s and 1970s the rules of convent living were relaxed considerably. One of the changes was that nuns were allowed to wear their own clothes. Suddenly my mother went from feeling as though she was a nun with a cause, a mission and a purpose, to feeling as though she and her sisters were little more than a group of spinsters living together. She left.
Looking Good: A Visual Guide to the Nun’s Habit by Veronica Bennett and Ryan Todd, GraphicDesign&, 264pp; £17.50