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 figure 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 have 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 hold on the collective imagination.
It's return has been noticeable this fall, just in time for Halloween, just past, 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 made into a movie classic.
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, New York, 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 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," Theyskens said.
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