Street Dress, Not a Vestment, and Younger Than It Looks

The clerical collar is the one piece of Christian clerical dress designed to work outside the church, and its history runs in the opposite direction to the one most people assume.

A signal, not a sacred garment

The stiff white band at the throat is not a vestment and carries no liturgical role. Its whole function is recognisability: it is what a minister wears to a hospital, a meeting or a shop so as to be identifiable at a glance by someone who needs a priest and does not know one. Who may wear it varies by church. Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist and many Presbyterian clergy do; most Baptist and Pentecostal ministers do not, on the view that it implies a priestly caste.

From Presbyterian to Catholic

The object is surprisingly modern. A Church of Scotland minister, Donald McLeod, is generally credited with devising it around 1865, and it spread from Presbyterian use into Anglican and then Catholic practice, which is close to the reverse of the direction most people imagine. Where a church ordains women, women wear it, and it has been a visible flashpoint in every denomination that has argued about the ordination of women.