religious dress, also called vestment, any attire, accoutrements, and markings used in religious rituals that may be corporate, domestic, or personal in nature. Such dress may comprise types of coverings all the way from the highly symbolic and ornamented eucharistic (Holy Communion) vestments of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to tattooing, scarification, or body painting of members of primitive (preliterate) societies. Some types of religious dress may be used to distinguish the priestly from the lay members of a religious group, or they may also be used to signify various orders or ranks within a priesthood. Some religious communities may require that religious personages (e.g., priests, monks, nuns, shamans, priestesses, and others) garb themselves with appropriate types of religious dress at all times, whereas other religious communities may only request that religious dress be worn during rituals.
In theocratic societies, such as Judaism and Islām, religious sanctions govern what may and may not be worn by members of the community; and religious dress embraces not only what is worn by a prayer leader but also what is worn by his congregation outside as well as inside a place of worship. In many traditions, habits serve to identify monastic groups. Indeed, in the latter case, the function of religious dress is more akin to heraldry as a form of symbolic identification than to liturgy, with its ritualistic symbolic motifs.
In a more restricted sense, religious vestments articulate a liturgical language as part of a figurative idiom shared with other religious symbols—e.g., icons (images), statues, drama, music, and ritual. According to the richness of the liturgical or ritual vocabulary employed, the more feasibly can a symbology of vesture be attempted. This is especially the case with Eastern Orthodoxy, whose predilection for symbolical theology has spread from sacraments to sacramentals and everything associated with worship, including dress. With allegory paramount in the Middle Ages, the Western Church could not escape attributing symbolical values to garments whose origin may have owed little to symbolism. From the liturgical writer Amalarius of Metz in the 9th century to the theologian Durandus of Saint-Pourçain in the 13th–14th century sacerdotal vestments, in particular the stole and the chasuble, were viewed as symbols and indeed operated as such in a way that still influences current usage. Thus, because the stole is a yoke around the neck of the priest and he should rejoice in his servitude, on donning or doffing it he kisses the emblem of his servile status.
The notion of dress as a substitute skin and, hence, as an acquired personality temporarily assumed has been widespread in primitive religion; such practices in shamanism have been widely observed in Arctic and Siberian regions. The use of a substitute skin in religious ritual is also explicit in the cultic actions of some advanced cultures, such as in the rite of the Aztec maize goddess Chicomecoátl. A virgin chosen to represent Chicomecoátl, after having danced for 24 hours, was then sacrificed and flayed; and the celebrant, dressed in her skin, re-enacted the same ritual dance to identify with the victim, who was viewed as the goddess.
Religious dress may also serve a memorial function, as in the case of the religious leaders (mullahs) of the Shīʿites (Muslim members of the party of ʿAlī), whose black gowns allude to the sufferings of Ḥusayn (ʿAlī’s son by Fāṭimah, Muḥammad’s only surviving daughter), who was martyred at Karbalāʾ, in modern Iraq, in ad 680. In the Eucharist, which is both a thanksgiving and a reenactment of the sacrifice of Christ on Golgotha, the chasuble (outer garment) worn by the celebrant depicts scenes from the Passion on the orphrey, the name given to the elaborately embroidered strips stitched on the chasuble. The fringes on the Jewish prayer shawl witness to “the commandments of the Lord” in Numbers, chapter 15, and remind the worshipper that he has covenanted to observe them.