Going Goth, FIT style

The Fashion Institute of Technology has three exhibits running right now. I happened to be in the area and decided to wander over and take a peek. What the heck? It was free.

There were dresses, dresses and pics. In The Museum at FIT’s main gallery, “Arbiters of Style: Women at the Forefront of Fashion” was the fashion of the day (actually the exhibit runs until Nov. 8). There were bunches of dresses from the 1700s to the present, and I didn’t see the point to any of it. Once, I cross the sarong threshold, I’m pretty much lost to fashion. Pants and shirts keep cops away so I wear them. It goes no farther, for me.

I did get a chance, however, to hear the following exchange between two tiny old women looking at a Zandra Rhodes dress (dropped that name like a pro, eh?) from 1969:

OW1: That is goooorgeous!
OW2: Chiffon.
OW1: What do you wear under it?
OW2: Nothing.
OW1: If you wear underwear, you’ll ruin the line.
OW2: Pasties.
OW1: Nothing but pasties.

That image just about ruined beauty, forever.

Fortunately, I wandered downstairs to the “Gothic: Dark Glamour” exhibit. It forced me to look deep into my bruised soul and realize … I like Goth as a fashion choice if the skulls motif is buried in a crypt like the cold, mortal flesh of my only love.

Something about corsets, I think. And leather. … The dark lust of my vegetarian soul is a 23-year-old, whip-thin junkie chick in leather, apparently. And lace gloves. What can I do? It spoke to me in a breathy, hot and pained wordless song full of major chords.

It cut me.

“Gothic” runs through Feb. 21, if you want to see the objects of my latest desire.

And then there were the photographs. …

The FIT is distinctly unattractive, a gulag on 7th Avenue at 27th Street, hewn from gray concrete by slaves of fashion, worked to exhaustion … maybe even death. Across the courtyard – in which rebel fashionistas are executed, stiff-spined and prideful, at dawn -- is an administrative building that houses, for the time being, a photographic project of Coney Island shot by students in the last year.

True art, I think, is the ability to capture the universal in a distinctly arresting way. It seems a crime, then, to turn a bunch of students loose on the most pedestrian of topics and expect them to produce anything remotely interesting. Criminal, but that’s what happened.

The photos weren’t bad … in fact, they could be called good and certainly better than I could produce. A woman in traditional Muslim dress walking barefoot on the beach with the madness of the masses a blur in the background was particularly interesting. But, they weren’t worth a specific trip to FIT. The troika of exhibits wasn’t, but if you happen to be in the area and drop in, you could do a lot worse.