Of Mammon Clothed Divinely: The Profanization of Sacred Dress

Abstract

This article addresses the cultural commodification of the dress sign of the sacred body from contexts of `God' to its recontextualization within contexts of consumer capitalism or `Mammon'. The concept of religious dress `commodification' is employed heuristically to help make sociological sense of the seepage of dress sacra from religious contexts of origin to secular contexts of use. While other readings of the late modern career of the religious dress `text' are indeed possible, the suggestion here is that it can be seen to float freely between the religious and secular domains and thus belongs to both as signage adding `religious' value to the material body for whatever purposes ñ commercial, erotic, ludic among others.