Vanity Fair’s annual Best Dressed list landed on August 5, 2026, with a headliner nobody had penciled in: Pope Leo XIV, the American-born pontiff whose habit of pairing centuries-old vestments with well-worn sneakers has quietly turned the Vatican into a fashion beat.
The pope, born Robert Francis Prevost and known affectionately to admirers as Father Bob, shares the honor with a roster of professional attention-getters: actor Nicole Kidman, pop star Rihanna and Oscar nominee Coleman Domingo. It is a strange lineup, and that appears to be exactly the point.
The magazine’s editors were taken with the collision at the center of the pope’s wardrobe — imperious Italian tailoring on top, unmistakably American footwear below. José Criales-Unzueta, Vanity Fair’s style correspondent, said everyone has a personal style, and that the list singles out the dressers the magazine finds most compelling, inspiring, idiosyncratic or some combination of the three, as he told The Post.
A Cassock, a Cap and Nikes
Criales-Unzueta was more specific about the pope’s appeal, saying the editors were drawn to his innate Americanness. He pointed to the way Leo will put a baseball cap or a pair of Nikes with his vestments, a habit he tied to the long line of American sportswear.
That instinct has not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Coverage of the list has returned again and again to a single image: the head of the Catholic Church in Nike trainers beneath a papal cassock. Nor is this his first appearance in a fashion magazine’s year-end tally: Leo was included in Vogue’s 2025 best-dressed roundup alongside ‘The Bear’ breakout star Ayo Edebiri.
Vanity Fair’s writers and editors — Criales-Unzueta, Lindsey Underwood, Derek C. Blasberg and Nicole Chapoteau — built this year’s list across five categories: originals, perennials, professionals, duos and the future. Where a sneaker-shod pontiff belongs among them is a question the lineup rather cheerfully invites.
What the Pope’s Sneakers Cost
The shoes themselves have become their own small subject of study. Leo’s most visible pair is vintage Nike Low Rise Plus sneakers dating to the 1980s, a model that trades on resale platforms such as Grailed for hundreds of dollars, and sometimes thousands. Anyone hoping to match the pontiff step for step may find the vintage market unforgiving. A close contemporary alternative exists: Nike’s Dunk Low Retro, which retails at $120.
The merchandising machine has already caught up. Etsy is crowded with Pope Leo T-shirts, the sort of unofficial tribute normally reserved for touring musicians and playoff runs.
None of this is entirely new territory for the office. The papacy has fascinated the style-conscious for more than two millennia, a lineage that reaches back to Saint Peter and his brilliant sky-blue robes. It has also never been simple. The head of the church wears garments that inspire awe in the faithful and, in some quarters, pointed questions about how a life pledged to poverty squares with the finest bespoke Italian linens.
Fashion’s Long Papal Fixation
Designers, for their part, have never stopped mining the Vatican’s particular blend of luxury and severity. Designer Wales Bonner sent a modern pope look down her runway in 2017, before she took over menswear at Hermès. In 2018, the Costume Institute mounted a Catholic-themed exhibition that included church-inflected ballgowns and suits by Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Dior. Rihanna — now a fellow honoree — turned up at that year’s Met Gala in a papal-inspired couture look of her own.
Then came the internet’s contribution. In 2023, an image of then-Pope Francis in a white Balenciaga puffer jacket raced across social platforms before it was exposed as an AI deepfake. The picture was fake; the appetite it revealed was not. The papacy, it turned out, could generate the same kind of style chatter as a rapper courtside or a striker in a tunnel fit.
Leo’s inclusion arrives in an issue preoccupied with what American clothes now signal. In his editor’s letter, ‘MAGA Has Changed American Style. Who Defines It Now?’ Vanity Fair editor Mark Guiducci frames the new issue as an examination of the country’s fashion fault lines, while writer Robin Givhan surveys the movement’s aesthetic in ‘Radical Chic: How the MAGA Movement Is Hijacking Style.’
Against that backdrop, an American-born pope in Roman robes and 1980s Nikes reads as something more than a novelty pick. He is, in the magazine’s telling, an argument about what American dressing can still look like — even when it is worn beneath a cassock, several thousand miles from home.