"Strange Beauty" Installation View

In Strange Beauty, the fashions are characterized by unconventional shapes and strange sources of imagery such as the image of blood in water from Japanese horror movies that inspired Rodarte’s gothic evening dress.

The Gothic has long attracted cultural outsiders, from the homosexual aesthete Horace Walpole, author of the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, to the habitués of today’s Vampire Balls. Just as the "barbarian" Goths were perceived by the Romans as the antithesis of classical civilization, so did the medieval Gothic come to be seen as modernity’s Other, its "dark side." With the rise of the Enlightenment, the entire medieval period was retrospectively envisioned as the Dark Ages, characterized by superstition and sorcery.