Elected to the papacy just seven months ago, Pope Leo XIV is quickly making an impression in Hollywood and among the elite fashionistas of the world, making Vogue magazine’s best dressed list for 2025. Source: Crux.
In its December issue, the magazine, which a month ago released a video of the first American pontiff listing his favourite films, named the Pope as among the top 55 “best dressed” individuals this year.
Vogue described the models, actors, directors, designers – and pontiffs – who made the list as “extremely fashionable characters” who in 2025 “dressed in ways that made us take notice”.
Pope Leo appears in the issue dressed in a royal purple liturgical vestment and accompanying mitre that he wore in Beirut on December 2.
In terms of his papal fashion sense, Vogue said the pontiff is known for “Breaking with the humble tastes of his predecessor” Pope Francis, who preferred very simple attire, while still “keeping his tailor and maintaining the papal legacy for fine-fitting liturgical vestments.”
Referring to a November 15 audience the Pope held with the world of cinema, attended by screen legends such as Monica Bellucci and Cate Blanchett, the magazine said that to invite Hollywood personalities of such stature to the Vatican was a bid “to modernise the Church’s image”.
Leo is not the first Pope to invite Hollywood actors and prominent film directors to the Vatican, as it has long been a Vatican custom to engage the world of art and culture.
Vogue said Leo’s best outfit this year was “his first appearance as Pope, on the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica, in a red satin mozzetta cape and wine-red, gold-embroidered stole paired with a cross pendant on a gold silk cord.”
In a teaser on where fans might see him next, the magazine said that, realistically, the pontiff would be “whipping around Vatican City in the Popemobile,” but that privately, their dream would be to see the Pope “working the Sundance Film Festival into his papal touring schedule (God willing).”
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Pope Leo makes Vogue top 50 ‘best dressed’ list for 2025 (By Elise Ann Allen, Crux)
