Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism

Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism Sally Dwyer-McNulty. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

A fundamental principle of apparel studies is that clothing communicates the wearer's personal characteristics, beliefs, and allegiances. This has certainly been true for American Catholics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, according to Sally Dwyer-McNulty, have used clothing "to negotiate relations between religious authority and laity, men and women, and adults and youth" (3). In Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism, Dwyer-McNulty traces changes not only in the apparel, but in the very idea of apparel uniformity for American Catholics. She focuses on the three subgroups she considers "the most visually distinct": priests, nuns and other "women religious" (that is, of canonical status), and students (5).

It is not true that Catholic clothes are "static and timeless" (204), an idea Dwyer-McNulty admits she too once believed. In fact, "the appearance of Catholics in identifiable and uniformish attire has a surprisingly short history in America" (4). For a large part of the history of the United States, anti-Catholic sentiment pressured Catholics to hide their religious affiliation. Even if priests...