Goth

[Homicidalheathen]

Gothic: Dark Glamour” at the Museum at F.I.T. is a fashion show with fangs. Its appeal is practically guaranteed, as modern-day vampire stories fill big screens (“Twilight”) and small (“True Blood”), and the arbiters of chic decree that black is back.

Irving Solero/Museum at F.I.T.

A shirt by Jean Paul Gaultier.

Irving Solero/Museum at F.I.T.

A Victorian mourning dress, circa 1880.

Organized by Valerie Steele, the director of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s museum, the show unfolds in a nightmarish mise-en-scène conceived by the British artist and set designer Simon Costin. The clothes have been installed in a labyrinth of haunted palaces, ruined castles and cemetery-gate enclosures. Naturally it all takes place in F.I.T.’s cryptlike basement galleries.

The gloom and doom can be overpowering, but Ms. Steele and Mr. Costin understand that too much is never enough for the goth devotee. And it’s impossible to upstage the clothes, with their capes, corsetry and fetishistic hardware.

As uniformly macabre as it is, “Gothic: Dark Glamour” resonates with several groups. Fashionistas will relish the chance to see famous creations by Oliver Theyskens, Ann Demeulemeester and other avant-garde designers. Readers of Poe, Shelley and other Romantic literature will enjoy seeing gothic characters and settings come to life (or undeath). And the eager consumers of adolescent vampire fantasies, from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to “Twilight,” will thrill to the clothes’ sex-and-death subtext.

Contemporary art aficionados, on the other hand, may find the show old news. During the goth art trend, which peaked in the early 2000s, Chelsea was filled with werewolf heads, fake blood and coded references to murderous satanic subcultures. In sculptures by Banks Violette and David Altmejd and video installations by Sue de Beer, goth references conferred outsider status and expressed a morbid mindset that seemed appropriate in the aftermath of 9/11.

The word gothic, which originates with third-century Germanic warrior tribes, has come to signify a macabre, antimodern aesthetic, one that encompasses (among other genres) Medieval monasteries, decadent and Romantic novels, Hollywood horror movies and the Victorian steampunk subculture. At F.I.T. an antechamber to the main gallery displays fashions representative of three gothic muses: the victim, the widow and the vamp.

In the victim category are filmy gowns that could have been worn by the swooning subject of Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting “The Nightmare.” (A reproduction is on view.) In the widow category is Victorian mourning dress: suffocatingly high-necked, monochromatic black ensembles. In the most spectacular category, that of the vamp, is a scarlet dress by Eiko Ishioka made for Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Its cascading bustle suggests spilled blood.

These archetypes reappear throughout the main gallery. Rodarte’s red-stained chiffon gown, inspired by Japanese horror movies? Ethereal goth. A slim, bias-cut number by John Galliano for Christian Dior? Classic vamp.

Also in the show’s first section is a fascinating curio cabinet of gothic accessories, among them a bat-shaped belt buckle, a brooch made from a pigeon’s wing and a bottle of laudanum. Some objects date from the Victorian era, others from current collections; it can be difficult to tell which is which.

The labyrinth of the main gallery begins with a section called “Night,” devoted to streamlined, elegant designs. Here a black leather jumper with a deep cowl neck by Ms. Demeulemeester, known as the Dark Queen of Belgian Fashion, offsets slinky dresses by Karl Lagerfeld and Giles Deacon.

The outfits in the “Ruined Castle” section evoke what the scholar Chris Baldick describes as “an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.” Hussein Chalayan’s shredded and deconstructed corsets stand out, as does a dress by Yeohlee with curved seams that take the form of Gothic arches.

In the background of “Laboratory,” mannequin zombies press their faces against a latex scrim. An infamous hunchback dress by Rei Kawakubo and a leather prosthetic corset, which both create the illusion of deformities, are found here. Kei Kagami’s torturous-looking shoes, inspired by a London cemetery, complete the show’s creepiest section.

In “Batcave” outfits are displayed in glass cases fronted with two-way mirrors; the lights are on a timer, affording only brief glimpses of the clothes. Here you are introduced to niche goths like the graver, or goth raver; the cyber-goth; and the elegant gothic Lolita of the Harajuku district, a center of youth style in Tokyo. Many of these tribes coalesce around music scenes, a phenomenon detailed in Jennifer Park’s catalog essay, “Melancholy and the Macabre: Gothic Rock and Fashion.”

To her credit, Ms. Steele recognizes that the goth aesthetic encompasses much more than fashion. Yet she closes the exhibition with an emphasis on the philosophical alliance between fashion and death, quoting Coco Chanel’s statement, “Fashion must die and die quickly, in order that it can begin to live.” That explains the perennial parade of black clothes on the runway, but not the enduring, cross-cultural phenomenon that gave rise to Horace Walpole’s novel “The Castle of Otranto” and Harajuku’s gothic Lolitas.

A few other questions come to mind: why does the show focus almost exclusively on women’s clothing, when the catalog devotes so much space to the elegant (and implicitly homosexual) figure of the vampire-dandy? Where did that aristocratic image (epitomized by Bela Lugosi’s Dracula) come from, and why does it still have such a hold on the popular imagination? The current national mood begs for a deeper understanding of the relationship between luxury and death, handbags and coffins.

“Gothic: Dark Glamour” continues through Feb. 21 at the Museum at F.I.T., Seventh Avenue at 27th Street, Manhattan; (212) 217-4560, fitnyc.edu.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 20, 2008

An art review on Friday about “Gothic: Dark Glamour,” at the Museum at F.I.T., misstated the date of the Henry Fuseli painting “The Nightmare,” which is shown in a reproduction in the exhibition. It is 1781, not 1871. (Fuseli died in 1825.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/arts/design/19goth.html