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. 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 evoked a pair of popular Goth bands of the 1980s, the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose music has been taken up again.
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 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," Little said.
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