Save this story Save Story Save this story Today, millions of Americans awoke to social media feeds awash with images of and commentary about a landmark event that seemed nigh-impossible a mere 24 hours earlier. I speak, of course, of this image:
Vatican Pool/Getty Images As the nation began to digest the results of a historic election that seemed to herald the arrival of a new America, two of our very best Americans met for a private audience on the other side of the Atlantic: Bob Dylan, the Great American artist, and Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope . Dylan is in the midst of yet another lengthy European tour—his strongest in some number of years, judging by recent bootleg tapes . On November 2, he played a show at Milan’s Unipol Dome, then jetted over to Rome ahead of a November 5 performance at the Palazzo dello Sport. What better way to kill an off-day than a quick chat with the Vicar of Christ?
It wasn’t the first time Bob met a Pope, as some pointed out . In 1997, he performed for John Paul II at the World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, donning a dapper Western suit and a fine Stetson for the occasion. He and JP2 made for a bit of an odd couple, the mysterious American gunslinger and the seemingly-nonplussed Polish holy man .
Dylan has somewhat more in common with Pope Leo, a.k.a Robert Francis Prevost, a fellow Midwesterner. But even if the two men hail from similar geography, the sight of them together under the bright fluorescent lights of an anonymous Vatican office looked like the product of a well-crafted AI prompt, if not an outright fever dream. The images were so unexpected, so uncanny, I would’ve been convinced they were fake had they not been published by an official press organ of the Vatican .
Much of the whiplash stemmed from the two men’s appearances. Angel and devil. Spy versus spy. The man in the long black coat and the man in the short white mozzetta . The one liners wrote themselves.
On Wednesday, the Pope wore a clean white cassock and a tidy little zucchetto , with an iron cross hanging down around his neck . In short, he looked like the Pope. I suppose I would say the same about Bob: that he looked like himself. As any good Dylan fan knows, however, the meaning of that phrase has changed radically over the years. Bob’s shifting appearance is almost as notorious as his shifting artistic sensibility. Dust bowl refugee, sharp-suited mod, bohemian poltergeist, whatever this is —the man has worn many hats.
A hoodied Timothée Chalamet, seen with Kylie Jenner, in New York City.
Sometime in the early 1990s, Dylan took a liking to the humble hoodie, a stylistic evolution that intersected neatly with his booze-fueled artistic nadir. The hoodie allowed him to hide in plain sight, even as he continued to take the stage around the world on his Never Ending Tour. It was practical, yes, but it was also a defense mechanism, a way to synthesize his compulsion to perform and his aversion to being seen. That it often looked hard as hell did not hurt. (It should come as little surprise that Timothée Chalamet, who may as well have been born wearing a hoodie , seemed to riff on this era when he was channeling Bob all those months ago.)
In the 21st century, Bob came unstuck from time. On landmark records like “Love And Theft” and Modern Times , Dylan burrowed into an imaginary musical past situated somewhere between the Civil War and the Great Depression. His style shifted to match. In the early aughts, he adopted a full country-western guise, complete with a Lee Van Cleef mustache . In the years that followed, his sartorial inspirations shifted east: a little less cowboy, a little more riverboat gambler , often performing in wide-brimmed hats, long frock coats, and string ties. “Rock and roll Mark Twain” wouldn’t have been an inaccurate descriptor.
Which brings us back to today’s meeting with Pope Leo. On first glance, Dylan’s ensemble is bonkers: western black blouson with contrast stitching along the chest and collar; beneath that, a heavyweight black hoodie zipped to the chest; beneath that , a white collared shirt with several buttons undone, collar loosely drawn together with a polka-dot cravat. The hood is decidedly up, stationed atop a black flat brim cap. In some shots, Bob can even be seen sporting leather gloves and an old-fashioned umbrella, which seems to double as a cane.
Vatican Pool/Getty Images Part “Man in Black” sobriety, part rock star debauchery, with a dash of the hypebeast flavor from Timmy’s A Complete Unknown press tour —the man got a damn fit off in Vatican City. There’s no other way to describe it. (It’s a shame Pope Leo left his Rhude jacket back at the Papal Palace.)
Still, it’s a look with roots in Bob’s past, or pasts: the hoodies of the ’90s, the Westernwear of the 2000s, even the polka dots of 1965 . No one but Bob would ever dare to pair all these disparate elements, particularly for a private audience with the Bishop of Rome. No one but Bob could .
Someone should come up with a word for that .
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Source: Celebrities
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