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Darkness is big in pop culture these days - witness the HBO TV show True Blood and the Twilight series of young-adult vampire novels (a film version of which sees release next month).

Not coincidentally, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York recently kicked off Gothic: Dark Glamour, an exhibition that celebrates the erotic macabre.

Bridging the chasm between Victorian mourning dress and Alexander McQueen ready-to-wear, the show was put together by director and chief curator Valerie Steele, a fashion historian whose exhibitions over the past decade have included The Corset: Fashioning the Body and Femme Fatale: Fashion in Fin-de-Siècle Paris.

Last month, Steele visited Toronto's ILORI boutique for the launch of Dark Angels, a collection of Goth-inspired eyewear currently in stores. ILORI is one of the corporate sponsors of the Dark Glamour show, for which Steele has also written a companion book.

What do the Goth aesthetic and eyewear have in common?

There are elements in Gothic fashion of veiling and masking that apply so beautifully to sunglasses. When ILORI came to see me, we were, in fact, styling the mannequins [for Dark Glamour] with veils and little pieces of black cloth over the eyes. This same kind of masking is conveyed with sunglasses - you can't see the person's eyes, but they can see you.

Most people, though, don't think of eyewear when they think of Goth style.

No, but I think the idea of looking and performing is intrinsic to all fashion and particularly to Goth fashion because it is so consciously artificial. Sunglasses are not just functional; there is also a deliberate artifice [associated with them].

Along those lines, I recently saw Lagerfeld Confidential, the documentary about Karl Lagerfeld, and he detests being seen without his sunglasses.

They are a kind of psychic armour, and that plays into the Gothic as well.

Do you think that designers are more influenced by today's Goth subculture or by actual Gothic history?

The standard interpretation is that designers are just ripping off Goth subculture, but I was very suspicious of that because it's not usually true. The more I looked into it, the more I found that the designers and the Goths are looking at the same kind of source material.

To what extent does the popularity of Goth style reflect the economic climate?

Surprisingly little. Goth is a theme that lives in culture at all times and then emerges, cyclically, out of the underground into public consciousness. I feel very pleased and self-satisfied that, after working on [the exhibition] for two years, this has turned out to be such a Gothic moment.

What about the future of fashion? Does it excite you?

I am interested to see where it's going, but I think that the history of people predicting fashion's future is abysmal; it's always wrong. So you don't see anyone who might be tomorrow's Coco Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent?

The industry is much more fragmented and multifaceted than it was in the past. Yves Saint Laurent was really the last of the designers who could launch a trend and then have everyone around the world follow.

Since him, there have been so many new style tribes and style centres that it would be very hard to have that same kind of influence.

You can still have giant moneymaking designers like Ralph Lauren or Marc Jacobs, but I don't think they have the same type of creative authority or universal respect.

Gothic: Dark Glamour will run at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (http://www.fitnyc.edu) until Feb. 21, 2009.