Jean-Charles de Castelbajac on the Sacred and the Secular

The French designer on bringing the work of contemporary artists into religious spaces, ahead of the release of a monograph of almost six decades of his work

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

“I try to make the Church and spirituality understood by young generations. In 1987, I was contacted by the committee of the Sacred Art project, along with André Courrèges, Anish Kapoor and Gérard Garouste, to create work for the Church. I chose to work in a jail, in a big centre near Paris, designing its chaplain’s chasuble. It was so mysterious. On one side, I was preparing my fashion show, and on the other, I was in this very brutal environment. It taught me a way to look beyond clothes. What is transcendental in clothes? I was lucky, because I believe in God, to have the opportunity to encounter this duty to the invisible. The climax was [designing liturgical clothes for] the reopening of Notre Dame in 2024 – the second climax. The first climax was to dress a saint, Pope John Paul II, in 1997. Today, that piece is a relic of second category – because the first category is the skin and the bones, the second category are items like clothes.

“There is a total connection between religious ceremonies and pop concerts. In Notre Dame, I knew I would have more than one billion spectators. It was really an affair. When I did the Journées mondiales de la jeunesse [World Youth Days celebration] in 1997, one million kids were wearing my T-shirts and I dressed 500 bishops, 5,000 priests and the Pope in rainbows, inspired by Noah’s Ark. You understand that it’s a convergence. It’s a message. It’s quite amazing, because I was creating in a world of luxury, creating for a purpose, also, of merchandising. Yet on the other side I always had this project where I have nothing to sell. Fashion has to be useful for the world or it does not matter any more.”

When, in the mid-1980s, the French Ministry of Culture and the National Sacred Art Committee launched an innovative project to bring the work of contemporary artists into religious spaces, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac was, arguably, the most unexpected figure involved. Born into an aristocratic French family that can trace its lineage back more than a millennium – his title is technically Marquis de Castelbajac – by the 1980s he had become a key provocateur in the French fashion world. A close friend of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, he first created clothes two decades earlier, using his blanket at boarding school and utilitarian household items like dishcloths and floor rags. It was upcycling before the word existed and a punk riposte to the luxury of haute couture that was prevalent at the time. He continued to thumb his nose at the fashion establishment, designing ‘fur’ coats made from plush soft toys and embroidering pop-cultural figures onto dresses, as well as designing liturgical vestments in his signature primary palette, “like contemporary stained glass”. This November, Thames & Hudson publishes a monograph of de Castelbajac’s work, spanning almost 60 years of iconoclastic creation.

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally now. Order here