Cloth plays a very important role. Pageants -- a common kind of ceremony -- need a backdrop; processions need banners; rites need markers such as scarves, shawls, shrouds or robes, and marriage ceremonies often include important cloth such as wedding canopies, veils, gowns, trousseau, a "hope chest" full of household linens and may even include the bridal sheet.
Pageants. Think of Christmas pageants in modern times. The curtains of the stage often portray a clear starry night with one brilliant star glowing above the manger scene. However, Christianity is not the only tradition that employs such backdrops. According to Women's Work: the First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber:
"Hanging up a distinctive textile is a common way of making ordinary space special, even sacred. The folk of southern Sumatra place a special ritual cloth, made by the women of the family, as a backdrop to the key participants in the most important rites of passage, such as marriage, birth, or death. Mary Kahlenberg, an expert on Indonesian textiles, tells us that these special figured cloth "identified the nexus of ritual concern and by their very presence delineated a ritual sphere." For example, "the bride sits on one or more ... during specific times in the wedding ceremony" and "the head of a deceased person rested on one ... while the body was washed." Similarly in Greek representations of funerals from the Geometric period (around 800 b.c.) special backdrops, almost certainly cloths, hung over or behind the deceased." (pp. 151, 152)
Worship. The laity do not wear vestments, but at times, they, too don special garments. The first communion dress of white organdy or batiste is a familiar site on certain church days in America. Choir robes are certainly not vestments, but they mark the persons who wear them as those who have an important part in the Sunday religious rites. Baptismal robes may be worn by those who are being baptized. The latter are nearly always of white linen or linen-weave materials.
Processions. What is a parade without a banner? Certain Holy Days are celebrated in some Christian churches by processions. Especially in processions in which various parishes participate, the separate groups use banners to identify the identify the individual parishes. (See http://www.stmarkcathedral.org/ptr-bnrs.... for banners used in the Stations of the Cross procession.)
