There is something rather delightful about Pope Leo XIV becoming something of a fashion icon.

Vanity Fair has included the Holy Father among its best-dressed figures of 2026, following Vogue, which included him among its best-dressed people of 2025. Catholics can certainly smile at this. Still, there is something more worth considering. That is, the fashion world has noticed something that Catholicism has always understood: Clothing can signify something beyond itself.

The renewed attention to Pope Leo’s clothing comes at an interesting moment.

Joe Hoover recently wrote in America magazine about the return of the cassock among American priests. The cassock, which Pope Leo wears, has become more visible in recent years, but it would be inaccurate to treat its use as simply a generational phenomenon. For centuries, the cassock has been one of the ordinary ways in which a Catholic priest is recognizable as a priest. It’s clerical attire with a venerable history and expresses something valuable because it is unmistakable.

A Roman collar identifies a priest, but the cassock does so with an even greater degree of visibility. In contemporary American culture, it is not easily confused with ordinary professional attire. That visibility doesn’t imply self-importance. Contrarily, the cassock can serve as an effective reminder that the priest does not simply represent himself.

Catholic theology has always understood the priesthood in this Christological manner. Through holy orders, the priest is configured to Christ, the head of the Church. The ministerial priesthood is not a profession, a career, or membership in an ecclesiastical caste. It is a sacramental configuration to Christ ordered toward the service of Christ’s body.

Seen from that perspective, clerical clothing does not properly say, “Look at this man.” It says something much closer to, “This man belongs to Another.”

The cassock expresses that well. It covers most of the ordinary clothing by which a person communicates taste, social status, fashion, wealth, or style. It has an almost ascetic quality. The priest puts on something worn by generations of priests before him. His individual preferences become less visible, while his ecclesial identity becomes more visible.

That identification has real pastoral consequences. Priests are approached in airports, train stations, restaurants, hospitals, and on city streets because people recognize them. Someone asks for a blessing. Someone begins a conversation about a spouse who has died. Someone who has been away from confession for decades decides to speak to a priest. A Catholic in distress recognizes someone to whom he can turn. The cassock can therefore be understood as a form of pastoral availability. Its very visibility tells the world that a priest is present. The priest who wears a cassock does not withdraw from the world by doing so. He makes himself more available to it.

Oddly enough, through Pope Leo finding himself on best-dressed lists, the fashion world has reminded Catholics of a rather old Catholic truth: that clothes can speak because material signs can bear meanings greater than themselves.

For the priest, the cassock and the Roman collar should never principally say, “Here is an important man.” They say, “Here is a priest.”

Properly understood, that identification does not terminate in the priest. It directs the eye beyond the priest to the Church he serves and, through the Church, to Christ, whose priesthood alone gives meaning to his own.