Smooth, smart, sophisticated - it's the dapper Papa

ROME - Living in Italy, the country of the "bella figura", it would take the single-mindedness of a saint to remain completely oblivious to how one looks.

Pope John Paul II, who wore the same plain vestments and nondescript Polish-made shoes for years, was such a saint. But his successor, Benedict XVI, is on a very different wavelength.

Since the first days of his papacy one year ago, his style sense has been bowling Vatican-watchers over: brand name caps and sporty jackets, expensive sunglasses, elegant shoes. Now makers of everything from luxury cars to loafers are climbing over each other to obtain his discreet endorsement.

Any pope is among the most famous and most closely observed people on the planet. What has given the luxury goods world a shot in the arm is the discovery that Pope Benedict, unlike his predecessor, has a keen eye for the fine things in life.

Branding PR firm Interbrand said this week that associating a product with the Pope was at least 100 times more effective than an A-list celebrity, because his following is more devoted.

Italian shoemaker Geox said it sends il Papa six pairs of its maroon-coloured leather moccasins a year. "We are not seeking publicity," the firm said. "We will not exploit any image of the Pope wearing our shoes, [we're] just paying homage to him."

Geox's founder, Moretti Polegato, is a close friend of the Pope's press spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls.

But how the other brands favoured by Benedict arrived is anybody's guess - and as the Vatican takes pains to unstitch logos and obscure the provenance of the things he uses, a lot of guessing is involved. Vatican-watchers convinced themselves from the Pope's first steps that he was wearing red Prada loafers. Prada has chosen to be as gnomic as the Vatican - or perhaps it just doesn't know.

The sunglasses question on the other hand has been definitively resolved. Vatican hacks insisted for months the Pope was wearing Gucci. Closer inspection, however, revealed his favoured brand is in fact Serengeti, the model called Classics. "The classic appeal of the open road is only one of your options," burbles the accompanying copy on its website, possibly alluding to the Pope's relative disinterest in globe-trotting. "No matter where impulses take you, Serengeti Classics improve the view."

Benedict has broken the taboo on wearing sunglasses outside the papal grounds, and was photographed sporting his Serengetis on the way to his audience with Italian head of state, President Carlo Ciampi, last June.

He has also been snapped wearing an adidas baseball cap, has received 20 pairs of swimming trunks from the Roman company Fallani, and is the proud owner of a pencil-thin iPod nano, given to him by Vatican Radio on the station's 75th birthday.

All these companies take the same solemn line of Geox: no comment, no photos, no publicity. Yet the message takes effect regardless.

Apple has nothing to say on the Pope's choice of MP3 player - but as soon as the news broke, Apple magazines were full of it.

A senior Vatican official averred that the Pope's choice of products was "completely arbitrary". He's aware of the buzz, but mostly he laughs about it because it's so absurd. What does he really have to choose? The glasses he wears are the same glasses he wore as a Cardinal, as is the pen uses."

All the indications are, however, that the Pope takes his choice of accessories very seriously.

The differences go beyond shoes and sunglasses to a profoundly different attitude to the material world.

Rocco Palmo, a correspondent for the Catholic newspaper The Tablet, says: "John Paul shirked many of the ancient trappings of the papacy for a handful of reasons ... He wasn't keen to allow the 'props' to upstage his message and himself."

Benedict has none of John Paul's expansive charisma; on the contrary he is an intensely shy man, who speaks of the 20,000 books in his personal library as his "old friends".

And so he takes great pains to look the part. Even so he sometimes gets it wrong: the sleeves of a humble black woolly vest poking out of his vestments when he stood on the balcony of St Peter's after his election; the cassock that was a good 15cm too short on his first appearance before the press.

The vestments that are his daily wear constitute an immensely complicated and ancient series of style statements, in which this most academic of popes clearly takes great delight.

Everything he wears means something - a fact he drew attention to when he chose to be invested as Pope wearing a lamb's wool garment, called a "pallium", of a design different from those of his predecessors, one that harks back 1200 years.

"The lamb's wool," he said, "is meant to represent the lost, sick sheep which the shepherd places on his shoulders and carries."

Since then he has gone further, reviving a red velvet cap trimmed with ermine which had not been worn since the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963, and a fur-trimmed velvet cape, called a mozzetta, which had not been seen around the Vatican since 1978.

Throughout his pontificate, John Paul wore a single, simple gold cross. Benedict has a whole box of them.

Vanity may have something to do with all this, but more likely it is the shy theologian exploring the symbology of his church's oldest traditions, sending out messages through the items he chooses to use.

- INDEPENDENT