Aside from the clear homages to Catholic style mentioned above, there are also more surprising ones in the exhibition, like Rick Owens’s infamous genital-baring tunics for men from 2015. Those, according to the catalog, are a riff on the drunken monk stereotype from The Canterbury Tales. The show’s fantastically composed catalog, with imagery by Katerina Jebb, does a lot of legwork for the viewer, decoding the meaning of certain styles of Catholic dress and explaining the importance of hierarchy and pageantry in the church’s public-facing efforts, while also showcasing the elegant simplicity of garments designed for the private lives of the clergy.

Tiara of Pius IX (reigned 1846–78). German and Spanish, 1854. Cloth of silver embroidered with gold metal thread, gold, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls. Photographed by Eric Boman

The exhibition further explores the ways that Catholic imagery and its storytelling tradition have shaped the creative minds of Catholic designers. (Hence why the fashion section of the show includes almost exclusively European and American designers raised in the Catholic faith. One notable exception is Undercover’s Jun Takahashi.) “As a curator, you are always interested in what drives creativity and what lies behind the designers’ and artists’ minds. I never thought it was religion. I never thought growing up Catholic had an impact on your creative development or creative impulses,” says Bolton. “Now I think that designers who’ve grown up Catholic do have this inherent storytelling tradition and imagistic tradition. Ostensibly the show is about Catholic imagery, but fundamentally it’s about creativity and what drives creativity. In this particular case, it’s one’s religious upbringing.”

To get to the real crux of the show, you have to dig a bit beneath its gilded veneer. Linger by a display of Rodarte haute couture gowns in the Lehman Wing and you’ll begin to see that “Heavenly Bodies” is also, in a way, the coda to the last three exhibitions Bolton curated: 2015’s “China: Through the Looking Glass,” 2016’s “Manus x Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology,” and 2017’s “Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between.” If “China” was about the power of imagination, “Manus x Machina” about the craft of fashion as an art form, and “Rei Kawakubo” about the magnitude of unfiltered genius, then “Heavenly Bodies” ties it all up as a celebration of the transportive nature of creativity and aesthetics. There is imagination here, in the ways growing up Catholic has shaped a designer like Riccardo Tisci. There is craftsmanship in the papal vestments. And there is genius—the sacred genius of creation.