Enter the Goth -- the darkness overtakes our culture

Embrace the Darkness -- by Ruth La Ferla

The blue-tinted title figure in the new animated movie "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" has matted hair and wears a corseted wedding dress that has been eaten away in spots, exposing swaths of flesh and yellowed ribs. Ravaged by her stay in the underworld, she is a fetching ruin and a frightening testament to what transpires when nature does its worst.

That unappetizing cartoon is just one of many Gothic images and themes that have seeped darkly into the culture. Books, movies, stage productions, photographs and, perhaps most emphatically, fashion are all evoking those familiar Gothic obsessions: death, decay, destructive passions and the specter of nature run amok. They've surfaced at times before, of course. But rarely since the mid-19th century, when it first became a crowd pleaser, has the Gothic aesthetic gained such a throttlehold on the collective imagination.

Its return has been noticeable this fall, just in time for Halloween, but it was already worming its way back into public view in the spring. That was when influential designers on both sides of the Atlantic paraded corseted gowns and black velvet tea dresses on the runways, not to mention high-necked frocks and coats worthy of Mrs. Danvers, the dour housekeeper of "Rebecca," the Daphne du Maurier psychological thriller that Alfred Hitchcock remade as a mystery classic.

Those fashions would be well suited to the ghostly creatures that inhabit "The Woman in White," the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical arriving on Broadway next month, its story based on Wilkie Collins's Victorian thriller of the same name; or to the subjects of "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," an exhibition that has been drawing crowds since it opened a month ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; or to "The Historian," Elizabeth Kostova's best-selling novel that delves into the legend of Dracula.

Consumers too are following fashion and embracing a Gothic style. They are snapping up trinkets that they would once have dismissed as perverse or subversive: silver skull cuff links, chains interlaced with black ribbon in the manner of Victorian mourning jewelry, stuffed peacocks with Swarovski crystal eyes, and, as party favors, tiny rat and chicken skeletons, recent sellouts at Barneys New York.

Such fondness for Goth-tinged playthings attests to the mainstreaming of a trend that was once the exclusive domain of societal outcasts and freaks. These days Goth is "an Upper East Side way of being edgy without actually drinking anybody's blood," said Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys. With a wink he added, "Who doesn't like a vaseful of ostrich feathers at the end of the day?"

The costumes and ornaments are a glamorous cover for the genre's somber themes. In the world of Goth, nature itself lurks as a malign protagonist, causing flesh to rot, rivers to flood, monuments to crumble and women to turn into slatterns, their hair streaming and lipstick askew.

Some scholars see the Gothic mood as especially resonant in periods of uncertainty. Allen Grove, an associate professor of English at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., theorizes that during war or in the aftermath of disaster, whether wrought by a hurricane or a terrorist cell, dark themes surface in part as a way to confront society's worst fears.

"We're somehow trying to deal with calamity and death," said Dr. Grove, who teaches a popular course on the literature of horror. "Revisiting Gothic themes might be one way to embrace those things and try to come to terms with them."

Olivier Theyskens, whose designs for the French fashion house Rochas are often identified with a Gothic style, says he is not surprised that his devotees want to explore the dark side along with him. People like to feel strong, shattering emotions like longing or dread "when they are feeling vulnerable," Mr. Theyskens said.

Other designers are consciously catering to that need. The fashion world has touched on Gothic themes before, but Riccardo Tisci, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marc Jacobs and Stefano Pilati of Yves Saint Laurent revisited them with particular zeal last spring, casting runway models as glamorous ghouls dressed in form-fitting suits and coal-tinted cocktail dresses that might have materialized straight from the pages of "The Turn of the Screw."

"We're going through a moment which is defined by severity and austerity," said Andrew Bolton, an associate curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somber hues and a rigid silhouette, he added, are the means by which some designers are expressing a broodingly romantic streak.

A case in point is Alexander McQueen, who said his fall collection had been inspired by "The Birds," the 1963 Hitchcock classic in which Tippi Hedren wears a chastely structured suit that is clawed to shreds by a flock of angry crows. Mr. McQueen, who acknowledges a melancholy influence in his work, makes deliberate references to "darkness and the macabre," he said, as a way of thumbing his nose at conventional notions of beauty.

The fashion glossies, too, have dipped into the morbid, showcasing mutton-sleeve black gowns and tea dresses and, in one case, a feathered white evening gown hatched by Dolce & Gabbana that might as well have emerged from a taxidermist's studio. Some fashion spreads have invoked a pair of popular Goth bands of the 80's, the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose music has been taken up by a new generation.

A Goth aesthetic is also turning up in movie costumes. In "Asylum," a late-summer release based on the Patrick McGrath novel, Natasha Richardson plays Stella, a psychiatrist's wife who falls for an inmate of a mental institution. In a pivotal scene she wears a severely provocative black dress meant to be restrictive and mysterious, said Consolata Boyle, the film's costume designer. The dress, she said, metaphorically covers up "oceans and oceans of what we don't know." Tear it off, she went on, and "you are releasing something primitive and animalistic, something to which most women can relate."

Douglas Little is a designer who has parlayed a lifelong affinity for skulls, Victorian curiosity cabinets, stuffed beasts and poisonous vapors into a lucrative career peddling wax effigies, skeletons, Ouija board tables and sickly sweet fragrances with evocative names like Thorn Apple. To him the popularity of these items reflects a growing taste for the eccentric and the exotic, which itself is a reaction, he says, to the antiseptically "clean design" that dominated interiors in recent years.

"People are tired of everything cold and sterile," Mr. Little said. "The seem to prefer things that are elaborate and even bizarre."

And mingled at times with a touch of the macabre. Among the treasures Mr. Little sells in the home department at Barneys is a 19th-century human skeleton, which he unearthed at a medical auction. When he first showed it to the Barneys merchants, they were taken aback, he said.

Not so the customers. Visiting the store the other day Mr. Little was accosted by a fastidiously dressed shopper who recognized him as the man responsible for the department's grisly décor. Cutting short her examination of the skeleton, which was displayed amid Baccarat crystal and Missoni furnishings, she darted toward him.

"I thought she was going to lay into me," Mr. Little said. Instead, he said, she turned to him brightly and confided: "You know, when I go, I want to be right here on the home floor at Barneys."