“There is something really appealing about darkness,” muses Nicola Formichetti, designer of Thierry Mugler, mega-stylist to Lady Gaga and overall sartorial master of the dark arts. “On a shoot the other day, a friend asked me why all my models looked so sour. I said, ‘Because there’s certainly no mystery in them smiling.’”
That mystery is perhaps gothic’s most alluring—and enduring—quality. “It’s the charisma of deviance,” explains Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, where the Gothic: Dark Glamour exhibition attracted record crowds in 2008. The show traced the growth of gothic from architecture introduced by Germanic Goths (condemned by Renaissance painter Giorgio Vasari as “congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, monkish piles”) to modern creations by gothic designer Rick Owens. However, a fascination with family curses and demon lovers found its first major pop-culture expression in early-19th-century gothic lit like Jane Eyre and Northanger Abbey, along with poetry by the original goth boys, Keats, Byron and Shelley.
So, gothic has been part of our cultural lexicon for centuries—a dark wave periodically rising to claim secondary elements like horror and punk. But this latest upswell represents something new. There’s the season, for one. A glum winter is one thing, but what does a sinister spring imply? Alexandra Smith, a trend forecaster for the Mintel Group, attributes the trend to recession anxiety—with a twist. “When the economic crisis first hit, we saw the rise of what I call ‘humble minimalism’: comfort food, an uptick in Friends viewership,” says Smith. “Now that it has been three years, our response to doom is evolving. People need a different form of escape—a sexier way to feel gloomy.” Enter the gothic bombshells who stalked the spring/summer 2012 catwalks at Emilio Pucci and Betsey Johnson. If you’ve ever yearned for a skull-patterned mini-romper, Johnson has got you (just barely) covered.
But sex appeal doesn’t explain the popularity of zombies—the new It monster that has been lurching from the cult milieu into the mainstream on hit shows like The Walking Dead. Smith, for her part, sees similarities between the zombie trend and the Occupy political movement. “It’s never about one zombie,” she says. “It’s always a collective—a mass of people rising up. They set aside their differences to fight for a common cause and become united as one.” Or a darker motivation: Perhaps the demands of our narcissistic age—in which our carefully crafted identities strut and fret on the social-media stage—mean that there’s relief in losing yourself in the crowd.
Rick Genest, a.k.a. Zombie Boy, likens the appeal of zombie apocalypse to the elemental thrill of anarchy: When everything is lost, all that matters is survival. “The system collapses and you have to either run or be lunch,” enthuses the performance artist and current muse to Formichetti and Lady Gaga, who borrowed Genest’s spooky aesthetic for her recent Grammy-nomination concert performance. Montreal-based Genest began his fullbody skeleton-tattoo project at 16, but he’s not bothered by the fact that zombies are so hot right now. “I get it,” he says. “It’s the same reason why people love Santa Claus— you step out of the realm of reality.”
As one of today’s most acclaimed novelists, Colson Whitehead is well versed in exploring the outer reaches of possibility. His latest novel, Zone One, takes place over three surreal days several years after a zombie apocalypse, as civilian volunteers clean up the destruction. For Whitehead, who grew up reading Stephen King and watching George Romero’s zombie flicks, the day of reckoning holds a strange appeal. “I remember watching Dawn of the Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers and connecting them to a fear of people,” he recalls. “For me, the night of the apocalypse is the night when the truth comes out. Everyone around you pretends to be normal, but they really want to eat and destroy you. It speaks a bit about my damaged psychology,” he adds, laughing, “but there it is.” So, is the timeless—and timely— appeal of all things gothic that they reveal our true selves: twisted and capable of anything?
For Whitehead, stripping away civilization to reveal its sordid foundation also offers the chance to discuss our apocalyptic present. “Monsters are rhetorical props used by creators to talk about how we live,” he says. “I’m trying to discover what it is about contemporary life that is ‘zombiefied’ now. We’re walking around disconnected, practically devoid of life.”
The image of BlackBerry addict as zombie seems apt—the distracted, shuffling walk recalls the lurch of the undead while following an established path that links technology to anxiety. “Gothic always flourishes at times of rapid technological change, when people fear being at the mercy of forces they can’t control,” explains David Punter, the world’s foremost critic on everything gothic and the editor of the forthcoming A New Companion to the Gothic. “Even Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1897], which was written during a time of great technological and societal upheaval, is crammed with [then revolutionary] typewriters and telegrams.” Punter also points out that, with gothic, the medium is often the message. “The first Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films were made at a time when cinema itself was seen as virtually supernatural.”
And that is gothic’s inherent magnetism. “People say we like to be frightened, but it’s not that simple,” says Punter. “We like to test the limits of our fear. Gothic takes us to the edge, but it’s not as scary as tsunamis, volcanoes and stockmarket crashes. It’s a different order of terror. We’re taken to the brink, we look over it and then we can draw back.”
As for Adam, the gothic hero of my high-school days, I wonder if he has retained his dark roots or joined the rest of us, gripping a latte on the subway, thinking about last night’s episode of American Horror Story. I hope not. There is something eternally romantic about the true outlaw—by turns defiant and fragile, raging against the light, ultimately doomed maybe but, for now, thrillingly, dramatically alive.
Source: Elle Canada February 2012.
