Vampire chic: Gothic glamour rules, from fashion to makeup

BY MARK ELLWOOD

Sunday, November 23rd 2008, 4:00 AM

Goth-inspired looks ruled the runway at Rodarte's Spring 2009 show.

Sorel/AP

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson take a walk on the dark side in 'Twilight.'

The mass hysteria over the new movie "Twilight" is just one hint that the combination of the erotic and the macabre is back - front and center - in pop culture.

Long-fanged, tight-trousered heroes with a compulsion for neck-nuzzling are the new pinup boys. And black-clad vampires are, well, the new black.

Emo music is more popular than ever - its angsty undertones are the perfect soundtrack to an afternoon spent curled up with one of the "Twilight" books or even the "True Blood" saga, which Alan Ball has turned into a series for HBO.

CBS tried a vamp show last season (cunningly called "Twilight"), while the gay network Here! has a raunchy, fang-y soap called "The Lair." Even Sylar and Peter Petrelli on NBC's "Heroes" have Dracula-like powers to suck the life force from hapless fellow superhumans.

And while the teen set has propelled the vamp vibe into the cultural stratosphere, even grownup New Yorkers are getting in on the chilling action. "I had a moment where I had to come out with my interest in geeky stuff - it's a great escapism, but I've had to own it," says Max Wixom, 30, a publicist from Manhattan.

Wixom and a group of friends have cobbled together a casual book club that would have Oprah's blood boiling: reading different vampire novels each month from Laurell K. Hamilton to Sherilyn Kenyon.

"We're not really in a Transylvania moment," he says of the trend. "We're moving Vlad away from his boogey monster to a romanticized figure that's beautiful. We're taking it to the next level of embracing the darkness."

Vampire chic is so chic, it has invaded the world of beauty. This season, makeup is more Robert Smith than raunchy supermodel. "Everywhere you look, people are using black eyeliner for lip-liner and putting red lipstick over that to give you very deep blood-red lips," says Dior Beauty's Ricky Wilson.

The brand's new dark gray, silver and blue palette called Twilight has just hit makeup counters, while Lancome's dabbling in goth glamour for the first time, offering a limited-edition black lip shine, Color Fever Gloss in Piha Black, at Bloomingdale's. It launched with a mile-long wait list.

"Normally, with everyday makeup, you go light on eyes and dark on lips or vice versa, but now you see a ton of pale skin with dark, black, smoky eyes and dark, rich blood-red lips," says Wilson.

Creature of the night couture is surfacing in fashion, too. "There are special editions of magazines that emphasize fashion to die for, the dark side - like ID's September issue: It was all vampy and gothic," explains fashion historian Valerie Steele. She has just curated a new show at the Fashion Institute of Technology called "Gothic: Dark Glamour" and believes that this esthetic has been returning, slowly, since the millennium flipped.

"The vampy thing is immensely sexy, but it's always going to be a minority taste - most people are more into the sunshine kind of feeling," says Steele, chuckling. "But minority taste will emerge periodically in reaction to all that banal, let's-be-cheery stuff."

Take New York's collections: hugely popular Rodarte, a standard-bearer of gothic glamour, showed dark, dripping, slashed knit dresses for - of all seasons - happy-go-lucky spring.

At a lower price point, H&M's latest designer collaboration launched this week - with Japanese avant-garde label Comme des Garcons - was an inky black, Drac-drenched collection.

The vampire lifestyle, it turns out, is accessible to all.

Party promoter Sebastiaan Van Houten - whose vamp alter ego is called Sabretooth - throws the Endless Night balls in New York, New Orleans and Paris.

He's an accredited Fangsmith, a member of a 30-strong global guild of artisans who make custom fangs for fancy dressers or serious hobbyists.

Van Houten fell into fang-making after a stint assisting a dentist in the early 1990s, where he learned denture crafting. Now, 15 years later, he charges $99 a pair ($125 for walk-ins) at his studio.

The current craze has reached such a fever pitch, he says, requests are coming from the most unlikely places.

"I've had housewives from Idaho e-mailing me, saying, 'Can you turn me into a vampire?'"