I was recently sucked down a Youtube rabbit hole and ended up seeing a clip of Kim Kardashian talking to her daughter North about her Met Gala outfit (outfit? costume?) in 2023. Strangely, I think North made a quite insightful comment about the overall effect of Kim’s pearl-covered Schiaparelli look. Here’s my best attempt at a transcript:

North: The pearls look fake—
Kim: No, I think you’re wrong here, these are very expensive real pearls. I think you need a lesson on pearls. We’re not going for flapper girl, we’re going for, like, vintage, authentic… pearly girly.
North: The diamonds ruin it. […] I like the pearls, I just don’t like that it looks like from the Dollar Store.

The custom skirt and top were made with over 50,000 freshwater pearls and 16,000 crystals. It took 12 artisans over 1000 hours to hand-string the pearls and crystals and drape them. I still can’t believe it as I type it. 50,000 pearls and 12,000 hours of labor?! It’s an overabundance of beauty. If a single pearl is beautiful and precious, 50,000 of them should be the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous thing to ever grace the Met Gala, right?

Somehow, despite the unthinkable amount of money this look was worth, the overall effect was… cheap. I remember, when it was first revealed back in 2023, people online comparing it to the pre-strung beads you buy at Hobby Lobby. When I look at a close-up photo of the pearls, I can see all the variation in one strand, the different shapes, colors, sheens. Each individual pearl is so uniquely beautiful; yet with 50,000 of them gathered together, you can hardly appreciate each one. It’s difficult to look at tens of thousands of pearls and crystals and comprehend it, because the beauty is more or less lost in the crowd. The end result is that it looks, well, like it’s from the Dollar Store.

Although Schiaparelli is known for being avant-garde, the house’s most iconic designs, in my opinion, are those that do less with more, that choose one element and highlight it boldly, like Wallis Simpson’s lobster dress, designed by Elsa Schiaparelli and painted by Salvador Dali in 1937. It’s a white silk organza dress with a wide red waistband in a very simple silhouette; the star of the dress, of course, is Dali’s giant lobster printed on the front of the skirt. The lobster dress would not have found much of a place in fashion history if it had been covered in 50,000 lobsters.

Roseberry took over at Schiaparelli in 2019 and has been reviving it for the past 5 years with a great dedication to Elsa’s original spirit and vision. His most successful designs have been in the same vein as the lobster dress—for example, Bella Hadid’s memorable Schiaparelli look at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. She wore a very plain black wool dress with a huge, lung-shaped gold necklace. If the necklace had been any less outrageous, the dress would have been unremarkable; if the dress had been any bolder, the necklace’s beauty would have been lost. Lobsters and lungs are not beautiful in the way a pearl is beautiful, of course, but the principle stands—a sort of bold simplicity, a sense of restraint, can keep a design from teetering into Dollar Store territory.

I witness a lot of people get overwhelmed by beauty at the jewelry studio where I work. Every piece we craft is individually designed and handcrafted—we spend a lot of time imagining up new designs and selecting the perfect materials before making each piece. Everything we put on the floor is unique, and we keep a lot on the floor at any given time, so many shoppers struggle to take it all in. Things start to look the same despite their diversity; expensive handmade items start to look cheap and mass-produced when you can’t spend 15 minutes examining the unique details of each one. I don’t blame them, of course. I think it’s just the way our minds work. We can only focus on so much beauty at once.

For another example—it’s like a large, highly decorated cathedral, where every wall, ceiling, nook, and cranny is filled with art. If you don’t have time to walk slowly through the church and ponder each side chapel, each painting, each area in its own right, you will probably not be able to fully appreciate the overall beauty of the building; you will probably, instead, feel overwhelmed.

Tomorrow, we celebrate the first coming of Christ in His Nativity—Christmas, the Mass of Christ. For many churches, this day is their grandest celebration of the year. They pull out all the stops: bigger choirs, new music, more decorations, finer vestments, instruments, programs, pageants, on and on. It’s rivaled only by the trumpet and timpani of the Easter Vigil. And indeed, there’s great cause of celebration and excess on this day! This is the Incarnation now realized before our eyes, the birth of our Savior. This is the beginning of an entire season dedicated to those words which bring us to our knees during every Creed—incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est. We are joyful and triumphant, overflowing with jubilation.

Every year, I love the excessive joy of Christmas, the beauty everywhere, the noise of it all. I love to see families all in their very best clothes and jewelry—things they would never wear to a ‘regular’ Sunday Mass—file into the pews and sing with full heart. I even love the poinsettias and greenery that fill the sanctuary and the huge Nativity scene that is currently blocking the altar of St. Joseph at our church.

This year, though, as I think about Christmas and the abundance of everything in this season, I am also thinking about Schiaparelli and Kim Kardashian and how easily beauty can be lost in the crowd. Our celebrations are an abundance of beauty, but the cause for our celebration, the Nativity, was not abundant in anything. It was simple, stark. For the past 25 days, 15 times a day, we have been praying about this simplicity: at midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold. Mary and Joseph were alone in a dark and cold stable in a small, insignificant town when history was split in two. There was no choir, no decorations, no families in their very best clothes—in fact, there was little beauty to be found anywhere at the Nativity other than this one tiny Child.

The first Advent of Christ was unexpectedly quiet, even bleak. I’m sure His Mother and foster father felt joyful and triumphant, of course, but in a different way than we do nowadays. It was the quiet, awe-filled joy that Elijah felt when the Lord came to him:

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great a strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still, small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. (1 Kings 19:10)

Our Lord came to us in a still, small way at His Nativity. He could have come with choirs and poinsettias and fine vestments, just as He could have come to Elijah in the wind or the earthquake or the fire—and I certainly don’t mean to imply that it would have been any less meaningful if He did—but He choose to come in a still, small way. There was no choir but the animals around Him, no vestments but the white swaddling cloth. The perfect beauty of the Incarnation was displayed in bold simplicity in a cold, dark stable. There was nothing to ponder in that stable but Christ in all His beauty; His glory shone even brighter for Mary and Joseph in the absence of noise and pomp and jubilation.

And tomorrow, the Lord will come to us again as He does every day in the mystery of the Blessed Sacrament. This is one reason I love the Latin Mass: the silence and hiddenness that accompanied the Birth of Christ are reflected here. Although the Traditional Latin Mass is often thought of as more extravagant and theatrical than the Novus Ordo, the peak of the Mass is actually very silent and small. The Consecration is recited in low voice, meaning only the priest can hear it. Christ comes in that moment with no extravagance, no loud proclamations or theatrics, no overabundance of beauty to distract from or cheapen this moment. Just like at the Nativity, He appears for us in bold simplicity.

What does the bold simplicity of the Nativity mean for our Christmas celebrations two millennia later? Should we cancel the choirs, throw out the poinsettias, and trudge to Mass in our plainest clothes? Of course not—like I wrote above, there is great cause for celebration on this day, and the abundance of joy that spills over into our music, our decorations, and our clothes is more than justified. I think it would be fruitful to meditate on the simplicity, though, and take a moment to hear the still, small voice of the Lord. To walk slowly through our Christmas and consider the beauty of each moment of celebration, like a tourist slowly exploring a cathedral with great appreciation or like a shopper studying the unique details of each piece of jewelry. To not let the noise and the crowd ever distract us from the stark, simple beauty of Emmanuel, God with us, as He comes again each and every day.

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.
Hoc erat in principio apud Deum.
Omnia per ipsum facta sunt: et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est: in ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum:
et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt…
Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis,
et vidimus gloriam eius, gloriam quasi Unigeniti a Patre, plenum gratiae et veritatis.

Merry Christmas, everyone. May the Light shine in your darkness, and may you see His glory and the bold simplicity of His beauty today, throughout this season of Christmas, and throughout your life.