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A knife in the back, a blood-spattered chest, the chalk outline of a fallen corpse.

No, it's not a new episode of Dexter, but the latest murderously chic trend to drip off blood-soaked film and TV screens into our homes and closets.

These days, being a fashion victim is taking on a whole new meaning with such aggressively designed products as Vancouver-born Tobias Wong's new Killer engagement ring, a viciously witty take on a classic diamond ring.

The item's brilliant-cut stone is reversed in its setting so that its dagger-sharp fine point faces outward, enabling it to, in the designer's words, "cut skin down to the bone."

Like design guru Philippe Starck's Domestic Violence line of table and floor lamps sporting gilded replicas of AK-47 rifles as bases, British-based Thabto's blood-spattered - and dishwasher-safe - brass-knuckle coffee mugs might also keep the conversation in line at the breakfast table.

If not, Viceversa's Voodoo knife block, which handily stores kitchen knives in the back, chest and legs of its coloured-polymer prey, can always be kept at the ready.

Should all else fail, there is Rhode Island School of Design student James Lear's new Fail bench, a precarious-looking seat that is best described as a Sopranos-style "accident" waiting to happen.

Hmmm ... do we detect some anger out there?

Whether you are blissfully content or dangerously close to going postal, it is indisputable that pulling off style's latest bloody-minded look means being fully armed and ready.

With its actual brass-knuckle handle, for instance, Iceland-based designer Sruli Recht's Umbuster umbrella can perform double duty on a rainy night as a class 5 weapon. (It was actually classified as such in Australia, where Recht was living when he designed it.)

Another notable addition to this style arsenal is Wong's Ballistic Rose, a Chanel-like bulletproof-nylon black rose pin handy for placing over your vital organs before heading anywhere fashionably dangerous.

And clearly one can never be too young to lay in the proper defences: Calgary designer John Greg Ball's X-crib is a baby bed incised with patterned cut-outs evoking barbed wire.

Using the same motif, RISD alum Jack Richter has devised what he calls the American Gulag bracelet, a circle of wearable rubber "barbed wire" (and one of several items in a line - the proceeds of which are donated to human rights organizations - intended to remind buyers of a United States government that, the designer says, "is effectively demolishing democratic ideals").

As it was onscreen in such Oscar-winning movies this year as No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, violence itself has become decorative.

Bittersweets NY's Heart and Dagger necklace, for example, features a sterling-silver copy of a human heart being pierced by a removable 14-carat gold dagger as a charm on a silver chain.

Sweetness itself, it seems, is being violated in items such as Brooklyn-based designer Jason Miller's Beautifully Broken smashed-glass vases (which capture the visual poetry of trauma) and Charles Krafft's unfortunately accessorized Sal Mineo Bunny (which delivers a coup de grace to cute and pretty).

British designer Alex Carpenter's Drop Dead rug, meanwhile, resembles a crime-scene chalk silhouette straight out of CSI and appears to hold its owners responsible for a fatal tragedy on their own living-room floors.

As effectively as the line between tragedy and comedy is being crossed by this trend, the barriers between decorative and fine art are also being blurred.

Dutch artist Ted Noten, for instance, exploits this ambiguity in his Lady K bag, a see-through Prada purse carrying a golden gun and bullet, while his translucent Murdered Innocence briefcase reveals a chic silver revolver equipped with a silencer. Inside the case, a speeding silver bullet and ghostly white communion gown float as if captured in a freeze frame on TiVo.

Such menace as art can pack some charm along with its commentary: Amsterdam-based architect Edwin Gardner has proposed a lighting installation in bombed-out Beirut to illuminate one of the city's many bullet-sprayed buildings with the twinkle of shotgun fire reimagined as tiny white lights.

As Wong's Murdered necklace featuring a gold-dipped skull glowing with diamond teeth demonstrates, early signs of the trend can be traced back to the Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired vogue for skull and bones motifs, now popular on everything from cashmere hoodies to baby onesies.

Then came the scary, Gothic-looking wallpaper, bedding and other decor straight out of a Tim Burton movie or Grimm Brothers fairy tale. (Sleep tight, children!)

Finally, the recent fashion for stag's heads, horns and antlers and heraldic shields and swords has only served to feed what appears to be a collective - if decorative - blood lust.

Whether it is fear or rage that lurks in the heart of design's new infatuation with killer style is hard to call.

What is clear is that design and decor are - despite popular assumption - far from removed from the struggles of contemporary politics and culture.

They are, in fact, responding in an expressive, even pointed way to the violence that is all too visible in today's headlines.

In a recent interview with the European e-zine designboom, Starck described his guns collection as a sign of the times.

"After just a short period of enlightenment, the shadows return, fast, dense and menacing," he lamented. "Nowadays we kill - religiously, militarily, civilly ... out of ambition, out of greed, for the fun of it or the show.

"We get," he concluded prophetically, "the symbols we deserve."

CORRECTION

Raffaele Iannello's Voodoo knife block is manufactured by CSB Commodities. Incorrect information appeared in last Saturday's Style section.