Crux

ROME – 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.

In an issue published Dec. 11, the magazine, which just a month ago dropped a video of history’s first-ever American pontiff ticking off his favorite 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 miter with the soft and gentle smile that first captured the world’s heart when he stepped onto the façade of St. Peter’s Basilica following his May 8 election to the papacy.

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 Nov. 15 audience the pope held with the world of cinema, attended by on-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 modernize the Church’s image” while indulging “his own cinephilias.”

Leo is far from 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.

Pope Francis himself organized perhaps the Vatican’s funniest audience when he invited comedians from around the world to the Vatican in June 2024, drawing personalities such as Stephen Colbert, Jim Gaffigan, Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien, Whoopie Goldberg, and more.

However, Leo’s engagement of the entertainment industry and his own personal papal flare have made an early and strong impression in his first few months as leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

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).”

Follow Elise Ann Allen on X: @eliseannallen