On a recent cloudy afternoon in Rome, two young priests from Ireland, dressed in simple tab collars and black pants, stood with their noses pressed against the display window of Ditta Annibale Gammarelli, purveyors of ecclesiastical clothing and tailors to the Pope since 1798. Gammarelli, nestled behind the Pantheon, is the oldest and most famous shop in a district that is to Roman Catholic clerical garb what the streets between the Via del Corso and the Spanish Steps are to la moda. In the window hung a sumptuous red-and-gold silk damask chasuble, the outermost vestment a priest wears to Mass; a hat shaped like a Gothic window, worn by bishops and the Pope, called a mitre; and red silk socks for cardinals. There was also a jewelry case of bishops’ rings and a sign that read “Shop Tax Free.” “Do you think they’re made of real gold?” one priest asked, about the rings. “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” the other replied.

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Inside, the store was thronged. Lorenzo Gammarelli, tall, bearded, courteous, was fielding walk-ins as the phone rang off the hook. “It’s been like this for three days. I don’t know why. Last week was extremely simple,” Gammarelli said. He wore a brown tweed blazer, a sweater vest, and a tie the color of purple crocuses. Lorenzo and his cousins Massimiliano and Stefano Paolo are the sixth generation of Gammarellis to run the shop, which has been located on the Via Santa Chiara since 1874, when the cousins’ great-grandfather Annibale—grandson of Giovanni Antonio, the first recorded papal Gammarelli tailor—opened its doors. The Gammarelli showroom is a deep rectangle, fitted with glass counters and shelves in a dark, glossy wood. Along one wall are small wooden drawers with labels like “red skull caps” and “braided cinctures.” Above the drawers is a row of photographs: Popes dressed by Gammarelli, from Pius IX to Francis. “Our most precious customers,” Lorenzo said. He gestured toward Benedict XVI, who, when he was still Pope, was voted the 2007 “Accessorizer of the Year” by Esquire. This prompted the Vatican’s official daily paper to publish a response: “The Holy Father is not dressed by Prada, but by Christ.”

It would also be accurate to say that he is dressed by Gammarelli. Before a papal election, the shop displays papal robes in small, medium, and large in their window. The site becomes as closely monitored as the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel. Even before the conclave is convened, the Gammarellis are prepared to dress the Pope-elect for his first public appearance. “We go to the Holy Father,” Lorenzo explained. “Everybody else comes to us.”

Photograph by Wojtek Laski / Getty

Papal apparel has remained largely unchanged for two thousand years, with even small shifts—John Paul II donning plain loafers, Paul VI consigning the papal tiara to a museum, Benedict reintroducing the mozzetta, an ermine-trimmed red velvet shoulder cape—sparking scandal in the faith. Lately, though, holy couture seems to have gained currency in the culture at large. In 2013, Pope Francis was named the best dressed man alive by Esquire. In the recent HBO series “The Young Pope,” Lenny Belardo, the suave, chain-smoking American Pontiff, announces himself to the cardinals by wearing ornate regalia from the Middle Ages. And, beginning in May, the Met will host the biggest fashion show in its history, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” The exhibit will pair high-fashion confections with objects from the museum’s medieval Christian collection—papal robes and accessories from the Sistine Chapel sacristy, many of which have never been seen outside the Vatican, will also be on view.

For Lorenzo, the relationship between fashion and clerical clothing stretches back to the New Testament (Matthew 6:28: “And about clothing why are ye anxious?”). “High-fashion tailors must always find something new, something different,” he said. “For us it’s exactly the opposite. It always must be the same. We have just one tailor, because all the cassocks have to have the same design, the same style.” The last tailor in the Gammarelli family was the cousins’ grandfather, Bonaventura. For the last twenty years, the head tailor has been a woman, Monica, who could be seen darting between the fitting room, where two monseigneurs were being fitted for cassocks, and up a spiral staircase to the workroom.

Ecclesiastical clothing isn’t entirely static. It, too, has seasons, governed not by the whims of Paris, New York, or Milan but by the Catholic liturgical calendar. “Green for standard time; purple for Lent and Advent; red for the Pentecost and the Feast of the Martyrs; and white for the most important feasts like Christmas and Easter,” Lorenzo explained. “As for pink, it’s for just for two days of the year, the third Sunday of Advent, and the fourth Sunday of Lent.” He took me past Stefano Gammarelli, who was assisting a woman choosing chasubles in six hues, a gift to her diocese, as she consulted at great length in German with someone on her cell phone. We entered the back room, where, in a glass case mounted to the wall, the firm’s ancient patterns were displayed—bound in portfolios of crimson leather, embossed with the name of the house, tied with silk ribbon, and still in use. “We have a saying in Italian, ‘L’abito non fa il monaco’—the dress does not make the monk,” Lorenzo said. “But there’s a reason the clothes are beautiful.” He cited St. Francis: “Francis was all for dressing extremely poor, but he said, ‘When you are saying Mass, you should use the most precious fabrics, the most precious things, because it is for God.’ ”

“Also, we wouldn’t be happy to make ugly things,” he added. “I would never say that a chasuble is ugly. But there are ugly ones.”

Eligio Paoni / Contrasto / Redux

Back in the front room, a gangly American teen-ager, accompanied by his mother, lurched into the shop. “Quanto costa? . . . ” he began, followed by a stricken pause. With encouragement from his mother, he finished: “ . . . the calzini?”

“The socks are thirteen euros, sir,” Massimiliano Gammarelli replied gently.

“Tourists buy many, many socks,” Lorenzo explained, as an apparently unrelated American teen-ager, with Dr. Martens and bleached hair, breezed in on the boy’s heels, took her place alongside the German-speaking woman on her cell phone, and also asked for socks.

“We once just had socks for the clergy. Black for seminarians and priests, purple for bishops, red for cardinals,” Lorenzo continued. Things changed, he said, around twenty years ago, with the patronage of Édouard Balladur, the former Prime Minister of France. “We didn't know him, but he used to wear our socks, the red socks,” Lorenzo said. “Just after he was elected Prime Minister, an interviewer asked him as a question, ‘And where do you buy the fancy red socks?’ And he answered. ‘In a small shop in Rome, called Gammarelli.’ ”

“Then some months ago with the movie ‘Ghost Thread’—I haven’t seen the movie yet—he’s wearing purple socks that he bought here,” Lorenzo said, referring to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” and to the main character, a fashion designer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who in one sequence draws on a pair of Gammarelli socks in bishop’s magenta. “There are people asking about purple socks, because he wore them in the film.”

“Do you have them in a women’s thirty-seven?” the girl asked.

“No, Miss,” a Gammarelli associate replied. “I am sorry. Only men’s.”

Back outside, the sun had come out. A busker, playing a cello, was grinding his way through Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” a Bach partita, “Stairway to Heaven.” Heading in the direction of the Pantheon was a young priest in a beautifully cut cassock, a clerical hat called a saturno, for its resemblance to the ringed planet, and a messenger bag. Seemingly deep in thought, and intent on the gelato he was eating, he appeared not to notice the heads turning as he walked toward the temple.