Fashion exhibition about Gothic Fashion

Goth through the ages: the Dark Glamour exhibit at FIT
Goth may have trendy cultural associations in this millennium, but fashion inspired by the morbid and macabre has been around a lot longer than Hot Topic.
And that's what the Museum at FIT is out to illustrate with their "Gothic: Dark Glamour" exhibit starting September 5. More than 75 ensembles will be on display from designers such as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano of Christian Dior, Rick Owens, Gareth Pugh, Anne Demeulemeester, Anna Sui, Olivier Theyskens, Ricardo Tischi of Givenchy, Jun Takahashi of Undercover, and Yohji Yamamoto.

"The dark glamour of the gothic has made it perversely attractive to many designers," said Dr. Valerie Steele, director of The Museum at FIT and curator of this exhibition. "John Galliano told me that he saw the 'Gothic girl' as 'edgy and cool, vampy and mysterious,' while Rick Owens said that whenever he saw goth kids, he felt as though they were his children. But other designers, such as Olivier Theyskens and Ann Demeulemeester, reject the gothic label, although they acknowledge that their work may display a certain dark romanticism.
(pic: fashion designer Gareth Pugh, working in his studio)

Here´s the link to the exhibition:"http://www.fitnyc.edu/aspx/Content.aspx?menu=FutureGlobal:Museum:SpecialExhibitions:UpcomingExhibitions

Vampira vs Elvira (two drama queens)

I´ve found out recently about Maila Nurmi´s death (the finnish woman who created and then played the character Vampira in the 50´s). So long it´s been since back then when she was a star that I almost thought she was immortal....:)

You can see her character being played by Lisa Marie (Elvis' daughter) in Tim Burton´s film, Ed Wood (1994).

Vampira, despite being a bit kitsch (we´re talking about the 1950's, remember) still had that glamourous femme fatale allure of the Hollywood divas. She was a mix of vampire and a witch. Sadly ignored by lots of gothic websites (I don´t usually see any references to her when I read something about Gothic clothing history) Nurmi herself claimed that Vampira's image was in part based on the Charles Addams "New Yorker" cartoon character "Morticia Addams", though she told BOXOFFICE Magazine in 1994 that she had intentionally deviated from Addams' mute and flat-chested creation, making her own TV character "campier and sexier" to avoid plagiarizing Addams' idea. Her image has been such a big influence on the female gothic look that in no more than 4 decades later another "vampira" was born: Elvira. So similiar and often were the comparisons that Nurmi sued Cassandra Peterson (who plays Elvira) for plagiarism. She didn´t win, why?

Much kitscher and less glamourous than the original one, Elvira was a mix between a 80´s goth who´s been caught in the post-punk transition and a Playboy girl who´s decided to dress up like a witch for a Halloween night in her hometown. Obviously, the look was still goth but the the idea was focused in a completely different way. Whereas Nurmi focused on giving her character a quite serious dramatic look, Elvira´s character is just a charicature on itself: big boobs that -I don´t know how- stay half of the way inside that dress (black witchcraft, perhaps? superglue, maybe?), made of the nastiest piece of polyester or lycra. Her hair -that wig that even Robert Smith wouldn´t have dreamed of back in the 80´s- doesn´t help either to give any kind of sophistication....In conclusion, Vampira wasted her time sueing Elvira. Vampira wasn´t immortal, she´s dead now. Elvira is tacky, she looks like a dark hooker.

If you want to know more about Maila Nurmi, check out this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maila_Nurmi

What is Goth about? (part one)

I´ve been doing a bit of research through the net and it didn´t come as a surprise to find lots of forums where the typical "gobshit" tells you WHAT is goth, What is not, WHAT you must or must not listen, read, wear, think in order to be CONSIDERED goth. It makes me laugh BUT in a sad way, keeping in mind that this subculture -as any other urban tribe- emphasize its rupture from the mainstream through an individidualistic and extreme attitude with their clothes, music and other physical/artistic manifestations.
There are as many different types of Goths or youths "into goth" as gravestones in a cemetery, but that doesn´t mean some are more goths than other ones. The problem is that people tend to classify everyone else who is different from them as "the others" without taking a minute to think who might be into what.
Music and specially Fashion, the field this blog is mainly aimed to; have always been the display of someone´s or a specific social group´s ideas. Since de 1950s, when the phenomena of urban tribes started, a part of the society -the young one- has always expressed their feeling of rebellion and alienation through very specific and extreme attitutes and looks.
But the question is, what is really Goth? Why are that people dressed in black? In order to understand Goth, it´s necessary to understand what PUNK was really about, because Goth is a derivation of this ephemeral urban movement. Punk was born in the 1970´s of a miserable United Kingdom as a reaction to the stemmed political-economical situation (despite all the economical and social progress of the earlier decade, the country was suffering an alarming increase in unemployment, the lifestyle was getting more expensive and also, there was the crisis of the petrol) and the doomed and more and more commercialized Rock, whose artificial and over the top looks and empty messages, the youngsters didn´t feel identified with. The Punk, rather than being based on making music, it was based on the social denuntiation.