Miriam Murphy, a costume conservator, sat bent over a cutting table at the rear of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, laboriously reapplying sequins to a silk chiffon mourning gown that last saw light when Queen Alexandra of England wore it in 1902.
That shimmering dress, along with some 30 somberly modish 19th- and early 20th-century garments, was being resurrected, lovingly readied for a second life as part of the museum’s fall exhibition, sassily entitled “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire.”
The show’s opening on Tuesday, just in advance of Halloween, was pure happenstance, said Harold Koda, the curator in charge, the exhibition itself born of his interest in extreme fashion silhouettes, but refocused when the Met acquired a selection of mourning costumes from the Brooklyn Museum.
“But a show on mourning would he appropriate any time,” Mr. Koda said. “Mourning, if you take a superficial view, is incredibly chic.”
Indeed, bereavement and its handmaiden, melancholy, seem to be sharing a moment of late, taking center stage or hovering in the wings of several current museum exhibitions, on television shows and in films, and in fine art and music, lending a whiff of glamour to a topic most people would prefer to ignore. That aura may partly explain why in recent months many Americans have suspended their dread of the D word to indulge a romance with the Reaper.
“There is this darker feeling, a pervasive sense of melancholy in culture and fashion,” said Shelby Lee Walsh, the president and head of research at the Trend Hunter website — perhaps an acknowledgment, Ms. Walsh said, “that life isn’t as wonderful as we see it portrayed on our Instagram accounts.”
A sense of brooding has seeped into the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition of the works of Robert Gober, a show incorporating body parts and evoking the specter of AIDS. A similar mood creeps through the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, a magnet to curiosity seekers since the opening last summer of its exhibition of funerary wreaths, Victorian hair art, post-mortem portraiture and assorted mourning paraphernalia. Its home, in a former nightclub in Gowanus, a location remote to many New Yorkers, has drawn sizable audiences nonetheless.
“To my surprise, attendance hasn’t petered out,” said Joanna Ebenstein, the museum’s creative director. On weekends, she said, the show, which is expected to run through the end of the year, has about 100 visitors a day.
Some see it and want to talk, Ms. Ebenstein said, to move beyond the notion of death as something exotic or alien and to explore earlier eras when it was a concept woven into the fabric of everyday life. In Victorian times, said Evan Michelson, who helped curate the show, there was nothing eerie about a home that displayed a funerary wreath made with the hair of a departed family member. Death masks, spirit photography, hair art and jewelry, Ms. Michelson said, “were something that in the 19th century were not viewed as ‘not normal.’ ”
The fascination with death and its accouterments tends to be cyclical. “It is part of a cultural movement of my generation,” said Ms. Ebenstein, 42. People are now less loath than their parents to examine the shadow side, she said. And youth culture is doing its utmost to coax death out of the shadows, lending the prospect of extinction an unlikely allure, and, dare one say it, sex appeal.
The specter of death is rarely more seductive than in Lana Del Rey’s hit song and album “Born to Die.” Her ghostly video casts Ms. Del Rey as an Ophelia, a portrait of winsome despondency. That was followed by Ultraviolence, which topped the Billboard 200 upon its release last summer. In that she appears as a lily-toting bride without a groom.
“She is sort of like a dark fairy,” said Ms. Walsh of Trend Hunter. “Being morose is part of her thing.” Writing last summer on the online news service AlterNet, Lynn Stuart Parramore linked Ms. Del Rey’s drawing power with “a generational sense that America has lost its way.”
Dark stuff. But then, grief and dread are as viscerally present in television shows like “The Knick,” the recent Cinemax series directed by Steven Soderbergh, in which medical procedures are performed in a surgery as ill-lit and creepy as a tomb. “The Leftovers,” about a town’s protracted mourning of its mysteriously “departed” population, drew enough of a following last summer to be revived for a second season. But it is Ms. Del Rey, Ms. Walsh insisted, who “has tipped death and mourning into the mainstream.”
Not that it needed the push. In last summer’s box office hit, “The Fault in Our Stars,” about a pair of cancer-stricken young lovers, a mock funeral plays a central role. That film was followed by the current “If I Stay,” based on a young-adult novel whose teenage heroine, comatose and attractively laid out in a hospital bed, renders the prospect of dying less chilling than intoxicating. How could it be otherwise, when The End is represented by a lavish garden suffused with white light?
An aestheticized vision of death enthralls collectors of the work of Vladimir Kanevsky, in whose hands porcelain flowers and pictures of skulls and decaying fruit attain an appealing veneer, an unnatural glow that prompted Howard Slatkin, an interior designer, to rhapsodize in the November issue of Town and Country that the artist’s works are “an improvement upon perfection.”
On the runways, mortality and modishness have long been intertwined. Gareth Pugh’s spring 2015 collection, unveiled in New York in September, is a kind of hymn to morbidity, his runway populated by pale models in hooded sackcloth or spooky black gowns trailing weeds. At Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci resurrected goth style in the form of funereal A-line dresses, some covered in multiple crosses evocative of a tumbledown graveyard.
Gloomth & the Cult of Melancholy, a blog and online shopping destination for outsider cultures like goth girls and Japanese Lolitas, has lately averaged about 1,000 visits a day, said its founder, Taeden Hall. Her offerings, like a double-tiered “Victoria” mourning dress and a bell-skirted variation called “Sorrow,” are suitable, she said, for Victorian dolls, modern mourners and self-anointed misfits.
“Those costumes embody the melancholy of not fitting in,” Ms. Hall said, adding that her site is focused on women between 18 and 35, “people who just want a taste of something a little more eccentric in their lives.”
Some of them will likely form the audience for “Death Becomes Her” at the Met, which promises to be stylish and somber at once. The garments, woven of crepe and almost invariably black — and in some instances, heavily veiled — were nonetheless as opulent as custom permitted.
“They incorporated every fashion detail of the period,” said Jessica Regan, the show’s assistant curator, as she pointed out an 1870 gown with an elaborately pleated skirt, a crepe sash at the back and crepe rosettes at the waist.
Certainly those dresses served as an expression of solemnity. “But by giving them a social context and the look of conformity, you show that you’re grieving but still subscribe to the larger thrall of the fashion world,” Ms. Regan said. “You have to make an effort. You’re still part of society.”
If, that is, you are among those left behind. In films like “If I Stay,” death, after all, is shown as a possibly blissful alternative. Which is why, in that movie’s final scenes, when the heroine’s ghostly alter ego wanders repeatedly toward the proverbial light, you are apt to ask: Will she be bothered to snap out of her coma and get on with her life?
And why some part of you is hoping she will not.