It has been a strange summer for Justin Bieber. And when we’re talking about pop music’s Icarus—typically in the news for abandoning a pet monkey in Europe or pissing on a photo of Bill Clinton—that’s saying something. Here’s the rundown: On July 21, it was reported that Bieber had been banned from China. Three days later, he canceled the remaining summer dates on his Purpose world tour. Shortly after that, TMZ reported that Bieber had ended the tour because he “rededicated his life to Christ.” We are back in the Justin Bieber mediastorm, a specific ecosystem in which bizarre rumors, even more bizarre truths, and harrowing paparazzi photos form a sort of barometric pressure system that hovers menacingly over Bieber’s undriven Ferrari in Los Angeles.
The storm is still brewing, but Bieber seems not to mind. Instead, the pop star has been spending most of his time with his pastor, Carl Lentz, along with fellow pastors and TMZ-adjacent spiritual leaders like Judah Smith and Rich Wilkerson. Maybe, as has been rumored, Bieber is hitting pause on his music career to live closer to god. Or maybe he is just hanging out with his friends. Either way, something interesting is happening, and I’m not just talking about the fact that Justin Bieber seems to have canceled his tour to go globe-trotting with a bunch of pastors.
Lentz runs Hillsong, the “cool church” made famous by its famous millennial parishioners including Bieber, Lucky Blue Smith, the Jenner sisters, Hailey Baldwin, and more. When Bieber tagged along with the crew earlier this month at the church’s annual conference in Australia, and as he appeared with Lentz at various clubs, stores, and restaurants over the past weeks, it was nearly impossible not to notice something: if Bieber is taking increasing guidance from his spiritual leaders, he’s taking sartorial lessons from them, too. Or they’re learning from your boy Biebs.
Either way, Justin Bieber and his pastors are dressing identically. They are having a ball glorying in god. They want to be “better at 70,” which, if I’m being honest, feels like a pretty low bar to clear. (Just be better now! Or at 40!) But what they really want, it seems, is to dress like pop stars on vacation.
It is not exactly news that pastors have learned how to dress with style and panache; this has been the case since Hillsong burst onto our cultural radar. But when did it become cool for the biggest pop star in the world to dress like his pastor? Or, perhaps more to the point: when did rock-star preachers start dressing like Justin Bieber?
Nearly two years ago, when Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote about Hillsong for GQ, Carl Lentz, right, looked like this:
I love god, the getup whispered. Also, I fuck. And cool, I get it, that’s great: “pastors don’t have to wear khakis” is an important lesson for us all. But at the time, the concept—that a man of god with less-than-evolved views on social issues could also have highly evolved opinions on fashion, celebrity, and the spiritual needs of city-dwelling hipsters—was earth-shattering. Now, it’s kind of commonplace. And Carl doesn’t dress like a human Chelsea boot anymore. No, now, Carl Lentz, styled-up pastor to the stars, wears pieces from the highly coveted Louis Vuitton-Supreme collaboration. He wears what appear to be Kanye affiliate Don C’s customized basketball shorts. He wears those skinny sweatpants with drawstrings so long that I’m not sure how one would avoid peeing on them.
Lentz is not alone. His brothers of the very fancy cloth have also switched up their styles. Zoe Church’s Chad Veach is partial to Fear of God ballcaps, and skater-approved Vans and long socks. (He also wears Bieber’s Purpose Tour merch.) The City Church’s Judah Smith tucks his printed shirts in like a cool, good boy. Vous Church’s Rich Wilkerson, Jr. likes Gucci more than the rest. They all love wire-framed aviators converted into regular glasses (or maybe they’re lensless). This guy, who is either Lentz or Veach, is wearing some fancy basketball shorts while deep in conversation in a back alley with Justin Bieber, who is wearing the same outfit. Mostly, these pastors are all dressing like Bieber, their their spiritual charge: in a blend of graphic-heavy streetwear, or maybe merch, and ultra-high-end designer pieces. Mesh shorts, unless it’s hole-ridden skinny denim. Old Skools, or perhaps that pair of Chelsea boots you just couldn’t bear to toss. Those aviators, calling to mind nothing so much as early-aughts American Apparel advertisements.
It appears as if the hipster pastor has evolved. It’s no longer enough to no-comment gay marriage while wearing a biker jacket. Instead, you need to do it while wearing skater socks. Aggressive glasses. Very long drawstrings. Bieber merch. The hipster pastor is dead, and into the void strides someone new. He’s a man god-fearing and Fear of God-wearing in equal measure. Call him The Hypepriest.
The Hypepriest evolution is not surprising. Lentz and his pals dressed the way cool kids dressed back in 2015; they’re simply dressing the way cool kids dress now. And that shift is broadly reflective of the way the fashion world has changed: ultralong tees, skinny jeans, and pointy boots have given way to bright colors, logos, looser silhouettes, and a certain skate-friendly scruffiness. Streetwear is ascendant, so the cool priests wear streetwear. This is an occupational hazard of being a cool priest, I think: If you run a cool church in 2017, it follows that you want—need—to look cool in a 2017 way. If Carl Lentz were still wearing leather, would Hillsong still be cool?
But being a Hypepriest is about more than just looking cool. It is also about marketing. The fact that these guys minister to celebrities—themselves under an increasingly sharp fashion microscope, thanks to paparazzi photographers, gossip outlets, and a host of Instagram-based outfit trackers—means they’re intimately acquainted with what’s trending in 2017. And if what’s trending is the freedom to wear your own logo across your chest (and down your sleeves, and across the hem of your shorts, and up the sides of your socks), it also follows that the Hypepriest marks an evolutionary high point in branding.
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Here’s Chad Veach, the pastor at Zoe Church, out on the town with Bieber wearing, per Bieber’s caption, official Zoe merchandise. You literally could not pay a marketing firm enough to deliver this sort of publicity coup. Now, the million and a half fans who liked Bieber’s photo, and the millions more who swiped past it, perhaps vaguely registering the content, know what Zoe Church is. Or if they don’t know that exactly, they know that this guy with the notable glasses and the cool t-shirt and the really cool twentysomething pop star friend is interesting. Or at least just friends with Justin Bieber. And maybe that’s enough: those millions of mostly-teenage fans are already members in the church of Justin Bieber. Why not join another?
I’ll admit that I find something in the emergence of the Hypepriest slightly disorienting. I suppose I got it when pastors started wearing Moves-to-LA-Once drag: the rock-star Chelsea boot look was a lightning-quick way to signify to potential congregants that this wasn’t your father’s preacher. Plus, the symbolism was easy: we could call them rock star pastors because they dressed like rock stars. But the Hypepriest feels...different. Hypermodern. Adaptable Scary-clever. I don’t mean to suggest that pastors shouldn’t or can’t dress expressively; the pope’s fancy robes and red velvet slippers are branding tools in their own way. And If every teenager with a CustomInk account can start a t-shirt brand, why can’t churches?
But the convergence in the Hypepriest of so many of the trends that make the fashion world (and the rest of life, too) feel so sped-up, disjointed, and frenetic—the sense that we’re always being marketed to, the omnipresence of the logo, the elevation of exclusivity and limited availability—strikes me as particularly notable. I don’t know that it’s a bad thing that Zoe Church is introducing a merch line; if they feel that that’s the most effective way to draw the sort of young, city-dwelling crowd that they want to attract, more power to them. If you’re joining a church for the t-shirt, it better be a cool fucking t-shirt—and Chad Veach’s t-shirts are cool! Justin Bieber says so, and Justin Bieber knows cool t-shirts. And I don’t—or won’t—doubt that these guys have Bieber’s best interests at heart. But I suppose I am surprised that the primary public lesson these pastors seem to have learned from their pal Justin Bieber, who is very publicly figuring his shit out, is that his tour merchandise was cool.
Here is my confession, presumably delivered to a man wearing a long-sleeve Gildan tee with his church’s name printed in a gnarly metal font down the sleeves: I wish Justin Bieber the best. “Love Yourself” is among the finest pop songs of this short century, and I find his Instagram account deeply charming in its utter lack of guile. But even if he weren’t Justin Bieber, he’d deserve the guidance, spiritual or otherwise, he’s seeking. We all deserve that. All I mean to say is this: It is rather remarkable that the men Justin Bieber has entrusted to deliver that guidance have decided to dress like Justin Bieber.
