Fashion, Faith & Being the Antichrist

It was in the mid-1990s that I discovered I was the Antichrist.

The insight into my true identity came in a letter from a Mrs McPherson, who lived on the Isle of Man. She’d read a book I’d written on fashion and style, and was offended that a Christian writer (a minister no less) could write a book on a topic as worldly as bodily adornment.

Mrs McPherson didn’t hold back. She described my book as: ‘a monstrous, blasphemous lie’ and ‘a wilful transgression of God’s word’. She added for good measure that I was the ‘Antichrist, adjusting the Spirit of God to fine stylish dress’.

The Devil may wear Prada. But I can tell you the Antichrist prefers smart casuals from Gant.

The background to Mrs McPherson’s histrionics involves models, vicars and catwalks – sometimes all three at once. Along the way, it raises intriguing questions about the human body, creativity, culture and faith.

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The Dissertation

In the early 1990s, two work-related events happened around the same time. My younger sister, Helen, became a fashion model, and I left my job as a commercial radio reporter.

My next step was theological college, to train for ministry in the Church of England. In the final year of my training I had to write a long dissertation, and was free to choose my own subject-matter. I was fascinated by Helen’s recent decision to become a model, in particularly the ethical questions it seemed to raise. I knew little about the fashion industry, or the history of fashion. But everybody knew it was all a bit dodgy. Didn’t they?

To name just one of the dodgy vibes I’d picked up: Vanity. Vanity is the excessive admiration of one’s own appearance. Wasn’t that the essence of fashion? The archetype of vanity is Narcissus, the beautiful youth of Greek myth, who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. Hard to imagine two figures from the ancient world less alike than Jesus of Nazareth and Narcissus.

To raised eyebrows from college staff, I wrote a dissertation about Christian perspectives on fashion and bodily adornment. In particular, I was keen to interrogate arguments historically used against fashion by the Church, and my own unexamined prejudices against the world of fashion.

I ended up arguing there was a legitimate Christian case to be made in favour of fashion and style.

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From Dissertation to Book

The following year, as a curate in Ealing, West London, I turned the dissertation into a paperback book (a). Fashion & Style appeared in 1995, with illustrations by Amanda King, a former British Young Designer of the Year and a practising Christian. Such is the transient nature of fashion that Amanda’s satirical sketch of the most geeky, uncool Christian I could imagine at the time currently looks insanely hip.

By that stage I’d also met Ashley Meaney, an Australian model who had found faith while living in Paris. Conversations with Ash, Amanda, my sister Helen and others added real-life experiences from the fashion world to the more abstract ponderings in my dissertation.

The book was launched with a grand fashion show in St Mary’s Church, South Ealing. Participants ranged from fashion industry professionals to random members of the congregation promenading their floral beach shorts down the central aisle of the church. One shy young lad paraded his cherished Brentford FC strip. It was hilarious and heartwarming.

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A Spectrum of Responses

When the reading public had had the chance to buy and digest the book, responses varied wildly. Some were intrigued by it, for the same reasons I’d been drawn to write it. Weren’t the worlds of fashion and Christian faith mutually incompatible? My book sounded provocative.

For a handful of creatives, the book proved life-changing – particularly for people of faith working in the worlds of art, fashion and design. The mere fact that somebody was bringing together their work and their faith mattered deeply, and they found my book an encouragement.

A few key church leaders loved it too. One was Colin Dye, pastor of Kensington Temple, one of London’s largest Pentecostal churches, and a former principal dancer for the Royal Ballet (how many Pentecostal pastors can include that in their CV?). Another was Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin had returned to the UK after many years as a senior church leader in South India, only to find his own culture unrecognisably post-Christian. He devoted his later years to reimagining what a Christian apologetic might look like in the unfamiliar new landscape of Western culture. I spent many an hour at Newbigin’s house in south London, talking postmodernism and punk hairstyles.

But others, such as Mrs McPherson on the Isle of Man, were outraged. I’d betrayed the gospel. The clincher at the end of her letter was this: ‘Those who love God are his, and not of this world’. Not only was I was being distracted by worldly fripperies, I was dragging others down to the ring of hell where I and other ungodly narcissists belonged.

So what did my book actually say? Thirty years on, a chance to climb back into the wardrobe.

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Fashion & Style Part One

Part One responds to arguments historically used against fashion. In each case, I argue that the Christian anti-style case stems from a distortion of faith.

1) Dowdiness and Godliness. I open with a dream sequence, in which designers Yves St Launderette, Vivienne Eastwood and Jean-Paul Gauloise discuss their latest projects. They also enthuse about their fabulous experiences with church groups engaging with fashion. But then ‘we return to earth with a bump, to a real world in which the Christian wardrobe contains little more than Narnia.’ Historical examples are given of Church leaders raging against luxury in apparel. Dowdiness is seen to be next to godliness. I suggest it’s time to question this verdict, and discover a more creative, culturally-engaged faith.

2) Body and Soul. Down the centuries many Christians have looked at the world through bifocals: spirit v flesh, heavenly v worldly, high art v low art, unchanging v changing, inner v outer. In each case, the first is seen as good, the second bad. Fashion finds itself at the ‘negative’ pole of all these pairs. In dualistic worldviews, the body in particular is denigrated. But biblically, God declares human embodiment ‘very good’. The ultimate Christian hope is resurrection of the body, not immortality of the soul. The biblical vision of eternity is remarkably solid.

3) Nature and Culture. The history of fashion can be divided into ‘artificials’ who relish the creativity of clothing, such as dandies and punks, and ‘authentics’, who don’t. Historically, Christians have usually sided with the ‘authentics’. But there is good reason to question these simplistic categories.

Through the Bible, clothing and adornment symbolises blessing. There is much imagery of God being ‘clothed’ in creation and in glory. Robing is symbolic of ennobling a favoured person (think Joseph’s fancy coat, the prodigal son’s robe).

The Prophet Ezekiel personifies Jerusalem as a young woman. God tells her: ‘I clothed you with an embroidered dress and put sandals of fine leather on you. I dressed you in fine linen and covered you with costly garments. I adorned you with jewellery: I put bracelets on your arms and a necklace around your neck, and I put a ring on your nose, earrings on your ears and a beautiful crown on your head.’ (b)

I comment: ‘Let it be shouted from the pulpits of the land: a sign of God’s blessing in Ezekiel is the wearing of stylish clothes and a nose-ring!’ By contrast, loss of clothing, or damaged clothing, symbolises loss of liberty or dignity. It flags up madness and the demonic.

Humans are made in the image of God, and the first thing we know about God is that he is Creator. ‘We create, adorn and beautify because these are the activities of God himself.’

4) Boys and Girls. Some Christians complain fashion blurs God-given male-female roles and encourages androgyny. In reality, clearly sexually-differentiated clothing is historically recent. In the ancient world and the Middle Ages, most people wore unadorned, loose fitting tunics. In the Bible there are no universal markers of what is supposed to be male and female dress or hairstyles. The issues are cultural, not theological.

5) Pride and Humility. Fashion has long been linked to Pride, first of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins. Stylish clothing has been seen as a marker of affluence, status and arrogance. Utopian writings, Christian and secular, usually assume uniform dress and the absence of fashion.

It is true that for most of history, fine dress did signify privilege. But today style has been democratised. It is more about self-expression and creativity, less about ostentatious wealth. Biblically, the essence of sin is missing the mark. This is evidenced in excessively low self-esteem as much as having too high a view of yourself.

Art brightens and enriches daily life, including how we dress. Biblically, humanity has a ‘cultural mandate’ to be creative with the stuff of creation. Images of the New Jerusalem picture it full of the riches of the nations. The ‘wife of noble character’ in Proverbs wears and makes fine clothes, and markets them to high street retailers. Lydia in the Book of Acts is a rep for a fashion wholesaler.

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Fashion & Style Part Two

Part Two warns that although there is a Christian basis for style and adornment, there is a darker side to the fashion industry.

6) Fashion Victims. This chapter is a protest against the tyranny of labels, and the dangers of shopping addiction as a quest for an emotional high. Style can become a substitute for a deeper sense of self, or a spiritual quest for self as transformed, perfected. ‘Style is one of God’s lovable, mischievous little creatures, but it makes a cruel master.’

7) Dying to be Thin. A warning about anorexia and bulmia, and the pressure to be thin in the contemporary fashion world. I chart the rise of the skinny model in the 1960s, and how historically odd this is. I explore the need for models to have supportive friends and family as a healthy corrective.

8) Getting Changed. The fashion industry’s restlessness and constant desire for the new. This can reflect an insecure desire to be ‘in’, to be cool, ahead of the curve. We live in a culture of perpetual adolescence.

9) The Stitch-Up. Who produces our clothing, and who suffers in the process? The biblical call to justice is in tension with practices in the fashion industry. When the book was published, this chapter was relatively new in sounding a warning. Since then, more has been done to alert consumers to evils such as forced labour, trafficking and poverty wages. Many garment manufacturers have been taking steps to monitor their supply chain more diligently, and there has been an explosion in ethical fashion.

10) Robed in Glory. I note the irony that so many fashion industry professionals follow Buddhism, which is ultimately pessimistic about the material world and the human body, and denies the uniqueness of the individual self. By contrast, the Bible is positive about the material world, the human body, culture, clothing and adornment. The chapter ends with a retelling of the biblical narrative through the metaphor of clothing.

Postscript. A concluding dream sequence. It begins: ‘The Bishop of Bath and Wells flicked back the mane of green hair out of his eyes, so that he could read the letter. It was headed with the crest of the Pontifical Institute of Textile and Design in Rome…’

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Thirty Years On

I recently returned home from five weeks in Paris – speaking and leading at St Michael’s, the English-speaking church near the Champs Elysées. Thankfully, nobody had alerted them to the whole Antichrist thing, which might have made them less receptive to my sermons.

My stay coincided with Paris Fashion Week 2025, and I was blown away by the number of fashion industry professionals I met during my time at the church.

Some were visiting Paris during Fashion Week, but most lived and worked there. They included two women from a famous Parisian brand, an editor from one of the world’s major fashion publishers in New York, and a young fashion influencer setting up a company to market her own designs.

I had lots of conversations about fashion and faith. It all felt wonderfully normal.

Thirty years after the publication of Fashion & Style, I allowed myself – in the words of Winston Churchill – a brief period of rejoicing.

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(a) Mike Starkey, Fashion & Style (Monarch, 1995). Long since out of print, but used copies can still be found.

(b) Ezekiel 16:10-12.

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© Mike Starkey 2025

Pic: Snakeskin boots, Clapham Junction – Mike Starkey