The last time I saw my old family friend Father Andrew O’Connor — priest, artist, fashion designer, social activist, philosopher — was five years ago when my husband Peter and I went to visit him at his parish on the Upper Westside. He was in a rush to make it to a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he took a minute to show us his latest art installation in the old baptistery of his church: a projected image of himself at play with a young family in their sun-filled loft that was cast through a constantly revolving lamp in the center of the room, throwing clear white light in revolutions across the dark old space.

Dazzling and complicated, he explained the installation as conveying a sense of community and interdependence, the cornerstones of both church and his work as an artist, before we hurried after him out to the corner of 82nd and Broadway where he hailed a taxi. We said goodbye, and climbing into the cab, he turned back and shouted so all could hear “Art will save the world!”

It was a strange sight, this scattered, red-haired priest, caught up in the traffic flow of New York, yelling what, for all intents and purposes, was an overly-enthusiastic truism.

Fr. Andrew O’Connor (center)with the artisans who make Goods of Conscience’s fabric in Guatemala.

But when he said “Art will save the world,” he meant it quite literally. That little phrase is at the heart of everything he does. When he was housed in his Upper Westside parish, his liturgical installations raised eyebrows and opened hearts among the accomplished aesthetes who populated much of the neighborhood. Then in 2005, after a religious retreat in the mountains of Guatemala, Father Andrew conceived of a new, additional work that would further enact his belief in the power of craft and participation. Born out of the desire to help the indigenous Mayan people he met there to earn a living wage through the practice of traditional backstrap weaving, a dying art, and to give dignity back to these workers, Father Andrew founded Goods of Conscience, a line of clothing and accessories made from the fabric woven by these Mayans. In New York, when he was moved across town to a Bronx parish in the shadow of the Whitestone Bridge, Fr. Andrew extended the reach of Goods of Conscience by employing his Hispanic parishioners to hand-sew his clothing line in the 1940s convent adjacent the church. Sewn in simple, modern designs with strands of unique, reflective yarn integrated into the fabric, his line of organic clothes has already caught the eye of the fashion world’s elite and been worn by Cameron Diaz in Vogue and praised by its editor, Anna Wintour, and will be worn by Julia Roberts in the upcoming movie Eat, Pray, Love.

Fr. Andrew calls the fabric he uses Social Fabric, alluding readily to the myriad lives involved in the production of each garment and the responsibility of one life to another.

“My idea for Goods of Conscience is locked in the identity of wearing this cloth,” he says. “It is not enough to simply know that it is ethically produced, because that will be forgotten, nor even to know that it is traditionally produced, which is interesting, but will be forgotten too. The bigger idea… is to have the cloth feel like incarnate, sacred flesh. It is going back to the roots and forward at the same time.”

Cameron Diaz sporting Goods of Conscience shorts in Vogue

Wearing his clothes, he hopes, will give the wearer “the stamp of belonging” – that sense of participation in an intricate network that extends far beyond oneself, but is taken up individually. That’s the great aim of fashion that thinks, I’d wager — this notion that we stand alone participating beautifully, distinctively, in the crowd.

You can meet this remarkable man, see his clothes (both men’s and women’s) and preview some of his upcoming world-wide community art projects at Stanley Korshak this Thursday and Friday from 10 am to 6 pm in the Women’s Classics department.