Fashion: I am fashion, your sister.
Death: My sister?
Fashion: Yes, don’t you remember that we are both daughters of Decay?
- Giacomo Leopardi, from “Dialogue of Fashion and Death”

Valerie Steele includes the above excerpt in her book Gothic: Dark Glamour, passages of which she employs to annotate a rigorously cerebral companion exhibit of the same name (appearing now through February 21st at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology). Indeed, the mortality of the body and of fashion is integral to our understanding of the pleasures we solicit from each. In the face of the finite, we seek to be sated. Desire and death intermingle in the 75 looks presented in Dark Glamour to create an undeniable sense of what Steele refers to as “the erotic macabre.” Mining sartorial landscapes past and present – heavily corseted and bustled 18th century mourning dresses appear alongside an intricately rendered blood red and black web of a Rodarte gown, apocalyptic Rick Owens constructions, and various incarnations of John Galliano’s darkly romantic vision for Dior – Steele unearths “the charisma of deviance” that characterizes goth subculture. The visceral charge at the intersection of opulence and debauchery is immediately apparent in, for example, a theatrical red silk evening gown from the spring 2006 Dior collection, embroidered with the Marquis de Sade’s question: “Is it not by murder that France is alive today?”

“I started working on the exhibit two years ago,” says Steele. “Then, it was just an intuition. I’m very lucky that the timing was right.” In fact, the timing couldn’t be better. The exhibit coincides with a goth resurrection on the runways, one that may have been prophesized by an earlier reemergence of grunge, it’s less threatening (and, one could argue, less thrilling) relative. “[Goth] is always going to be a minority taste”, Steele explains, “emerging like a hand out of the coffin before it retreats into darkness again.” Peripheral though its literal manifestations may be, of all possible cultural milieus, slasher films were the most oft-cited influence by designers this fall.

Alexander McQueen, responsible, as it were, for the ubiquitous skull-printed scarf, may have instigated the revival with his Salem-witch-trial-inspired fall 2007 show. But this season saw interpretations by designers as disparate as Britain’s current enfant terrible, Gareth Pugh, (whose models, in whiteface and black lipstick, evoked otherworldly warriors in exaggerated silhouettes composed of zippers, safety pins, and goat hair) and cocktail-attire confectioner, Jill Stuart (channeling a come-hither Joan of Arc throughout her notably darker and edgier collection). Any one of Tao Kurihara’s dark ladies – swaddled in shadowy, cocoon-like knits, and blinking above the phrases “Be aware”, “Be powerful”, writ across their cheekbones – seemed capable of casting a spell. And Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy slyly conjured a crossroads of the sacred and profane, referencing his Catholic upbringing before sending girls down the catwalk in skintight leather trousers and sheer black lace blouses, adorned with an abundance of gold chains and crosses. In many ways, this notion of defiled reverence typifies the misfit mentality of the goth movement. Think Angelina Jolie in her witchier (and more fascinating) embodiment, vial of her beloved’s blood dangling from her throat, and you begin to get the picture.

Popular culture, too, seems primed for the resurgence. When Dita Von Teese, inky seductress of painful-to-look-at proportions, divorced pop-goth icon Marilyn Manson last year, the tabloids ravaged the Svengali-like transformation of his mistress Evan Rachel Wood from barely legal blond ingénue to a raven-haired Von Teese doppelganger with a dirty streak. Perpetually ghoulish director, Tim Burton, brought a decidedly sanguine film version of Sweeney Todd to theaters last summer. This fall, TV audiences can tune into True Blood, a vampire-centric HBO series from Six Feet Under creator, Alan Ball, while awaiting the big screen arrival of the bloodsucker movie, Twilight. Not incidentally, both are love stories.

Responding to Victorian-era sexual anxiety and xenophobia, Bram Stoker penned Dracula in 1897. “The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating,” he wrote. “There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck, she actually licked her lips like an animal.” Given such seductive intellectual roots, the recent resuscitation of goth culture’s vestments – murky, fetishized, and predatory – should come as no surprise.