The Dark Glamour of Neo-Victorian Gothic

Abstract

Kambriel and other designers suggest that contemporary Goths respond to the "morbid allure and claustrophobic corsetry" of Victorian fancy. [...]visitors to Gothic: Dark Glamour see the Victorian period constructed for modern (fashion) audiences as a distinctly Gothic setting. [...]the exhibition functions as its own cabinet of curiosities, blending a Victorian past and a postmodern present, defying categorical and historical boundaries, and revealing what the current cultural obsession with Gothic narratives and styles already suggests: that we now see ourselves through a glass very darkly.

The Dark Glamour of Neo-Victorian Gothic

Gothic: Dark Glamour Exhibit, curated by Valerie Steele

New York Fashion Institute of Technology, 5 September 2008 - 21 February 2009

"Your mind is in disturbia" sang the reigning princess of R&B music, Rihanna, as she opened the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards on September 7th. Clothed in high-fashion black leather and feather bondage gear, she and an entourage of back-up dancers miming zombies gyrated around the stage as she asked seductively, "Am I scaring you tonight?" If the performance, which resurrected Michael Jacksons's Thriller with a touch of S&M, frightened the audience it was with no more than a pleasantly titillating thrill as Rihanna's macabre Gothic-inspired musical opening effectively upstaged the return of Britney Spears and kept more than 8.4 million viewers riveted to the screen.

MTV, perennial source of all things trendy, used its opening entertainment as a clever marketing tool, for Rihanna's performance responded to the Gothic vampire craze present in contemporary youth culture, particularly the culture of adolescent girls. The popularity of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series of fantasy novels has positioned the author as the J.K. Rowling of "tweens" and teens. Twilight, first book in the series, sold over 1.5 million copies, and the final installment, Breaking Dawn, sold 1.3 million within 24 hours of its release. Not coincidentally, a movie adaptation of Twilight opens in November. Even HBO, a network with programming geared more toward adults, has staked (pun intended) its claim to vampire narratives, premiering this Fall its drama True Blood, based on a series of Southern vampire mysteries by Charlaine Harris. Alan Ball, writer of American Beauty and creator of the critically-acclaimed series Six Feet Under (also for HBO), has said in interviews that he sees True Blood as an opportunity to continue the popularity of vampire shows like Dark Shadows, while simultaneously providing viewers with smart, witty pop satire of American culture and politics.

A phenomenon like the Twilight series has its roots in the earlier success of Bufty the Vampire Slayer and the all-black Goth fashion popular amongst teenagers in the late 1990s, developments that both proved of interest to academic scholarship. Milly Williamson's essays in Reframing the Body (2001) and Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part (2001) address women's complex relationship to the image of the vampire and Gothic fashion as a means of self-expression. Williamson speculates that fascination with vampires and with Gothic clothing originates in a desire to produce "nonconformist identities through oppositional dress." This gesture of rebellion is, however, contradictory, as vampire narratives and their corresponding fashions simultaneously reject and retain conventional ideals of femininity.

Although the rise of the Gothic has been a prominent topic in academic publishing for several years, it has, until recently, bypassed the museum world. Certainly, no show had looked at pop culture versions of Gothic through the lens of fashion history and theory. On September 5th, the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City mounted the first exhibition devoted to Gothic style: Gothic: Dark Glamour, curated by the museum's director, Valerie F. Steele.

The intersection of the Gothic with clothing style has long been a staple of both the gothic as a literary genre and the Goth cultural movement. The wall text for FIT Museum's exhibition includes a telling quotation from Catherine Spooner's Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004): "Within gothic discourse, the clothes are the life" - a play on Bela Fugosi's famous pronouncement, as Dracula, that "The blood is the life."

Spooner continues, "Surely, therefore, within the world of fashion, it is this enduring potency of gothic images for imaginative self-identification that leads to their perennial revival/' Like a vampire rising from its coffin, our fascination with the Gothic continues to come back to (after)life as we use Gothic trappings to imagine new selves and recycle alternative identities.

The new lifeblood of Gothic fashion also comes from another source. Throughout the exhibition, Valerie F. Steele emphasizes the morbid allure attached to the Victorian period as a significant factor in the Gothic's ongoing afterlife. Scholarly studies, such as Cora Kaplan's Victoriano: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007) and John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff's essay collection, Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (2000), have already established the connection between the popularity of recent Victorian revivals and the Gothic. In fact, the cover of the paperback edition of Victorian Afterlife serves as an excellent example of the intersection between Gothic and fashion: the features of the female model are obscured by a funereal black coatdress with a cascade of hyperbolically feminine white ruffles exploding from the neckline. The image echoes almost precisely the Fall 1997 creation "Camaïeu de Roses" (Cameo of Roses) by haute couture designer Thierry Mugieron display in Gothic: Dark Glamour. Mugler's black silk faille and silk taffeta dress re-envisions a Victorian-style mourning gown, with dark fuchsia fabric blossoms bursting from both neck and wrists.

At the beginning of the exhibition, which is fittingly housed in the FIT Museum's basement, Steele juxtaposes the Victorian cult of death with the figure of the vampire. Gowns from KambrieFs 2007 collection stand next to authentic Victorian mourning clothes, circa 1880. Kambriel and other designers suggest that contemporary Goths respond to the "morbid allure and claustrophobic corsetry" of Victorian fancy. Thus, visitors to Gothic: Dark Glamour see the Victorian period constructed for modern (fashion) audiences as a distinctly Gothic setting. The Gothic, and simultaneously the Victorian age, becomes synonymous not only with fear and terror, but with anxieties over contested femininity. Both the clothes on display and the layout and structure of the exhibit pay homage to contemporary fashion's Victorian antecedents and to Victorian debates over women's social roles.

Instances of hyperbolic femininity recur throughout Steele's show, especially in the voluminous gowns of Alexander McQueen and of Kate and Laura Mulleavy. But one of the most interesting intersections of Victoriania, Gothic, and hyper-feminine attire is represented in the "Elegant Lolita" fashion movement from Japan. Designers such as Hirooka Naota have combined fanciful babydoll dresses with parasols and petticoats. Naota's models clutch angry dolls, with skull-like faces reminiscent of figures from Tim Burton's film The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) or from the graphic novel Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (Jhonen Vasquez 1995). With fashion-forward American pop singers like Gwen Stefani-who now has her own line of clothes-embracing the Elegant Lolita (also called "Gothic Lolita") look, the trend has even begun to turn up on campuses in the U.S.

The corset, that most iconic of Victorian symbols of restrictive femininity, also appears numerous times throughout the exhibit, perhaps never more memorably than in the "Strange Beauty" collection, where Yohji Yamamoto's 2006 black silk crepe ensemble with cage corset resurrects, according to Steele, the "twenty-first century equivalent of whale-boning" while "simultaneously evoking the human rib cage." Not coincidentally, Steele made a name for herself in scholarly circles as a historian and apologist for the corset with her book The Corset: A Cultural History (2001).

In the display area called "Ruined Castle/' an outfit by Hussein Chalayan plays with past trends in fashion by deconstructing a garment made from blue silk, gauze, netting, cotton, and lace. Inspired by the idea of ruination, the dress is meant to imply that it was "ripped apart by a voodoo curse." Interestingly, what is left behind in the deconstructed garment is a look reminiscent of a Dickensian street urchin, complete with artful tatters and uneven handkerchief hem. Apparently, stripping away layers of Gothic fashion leaves us with the aesthetic stylings of one of the Victorians' most successful novelists-a creation that is half the fashion sister of Oliver Twist and half the stepchild of Miss Havisham.

Miss Havisham's contradictory world of preservation and decay is also evoked in the section of the show called "Cabinet of Curiosities," which Steele uses both for Victorian memorabilia and modern Goth fetish accessories. The examples of memento morí collected in this cabinet include the death mask of the nineteenth-century American poet Celia Thaxter and Victorian mourning jewelry and hair-wreaths encased in shadowboxes placed alongside contemporary bracelets, chokers, and rings featuring skulls and bats. Once again, Victorian and the twenty-first-century styles mirror each other, brought together in the same Gothic discourse.

Gothic: Dark Glamour ends by making the idea of reflection literal. In the "Bat Cave," Goth and cyberpunk clothing of the kind favored by black-clad Goth teenagers shares space with a two-way mirror. As the lights are dimmed and raised, the viewer sees either the high-fashion equivalents of contemporary Goth street clothes or only herself in the Gothic mirror. Thus, the exhibition functions as its own cabinet of curiosities, blending a Victorian past and a postmodern present, defying categorical and historical boundaries, and revealing what the current cultural obsession with Gothic narratives and styles already suggests: that we now see ourselves through a glass very darkly.