Witches Lose the Warts

Lena Duchannes is new in town, exotic and seductive to a handful of bored locals in the Southern community where she lives. But if that weren’t enough to turn her into man bait, her pallid good looks would do the trick.

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Lena, the sweet-and-sulky heroine of “Beautiful Creatures,” the film adapted from the young-adult novel of the same title, is a witch — a caster, in the parlance of her kind — who can, by a glance, shatter glass or summon a tempest or, when the spirit moves her, capture the heart of a hunky young man.

She is one in a coven of weird sisters who in recent months have darkened the plots of adolescent fiction and films, and cast an enchantment on the concert stage and the fashion runways, where witchy apparitions have come to represent a kind of wish fulfillment.

“The witch is the ultimate bad girl,” said Carly Cushnie of the design team Cushnie et Ochs, who riffed on the Salem witch trials in the fall collection she unveiled last month. “You want to be her.”

It’s a concept, all right. Witchcraft and its moody expressions — long weedy hair, peaked hats and pointy boots — have attained a strange cachet of late. No longer the hideous wart-covered crone of folklore and fairy tale, the witch of current films, like “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” and “Oz: The Great and Powerful,” and recent youth-oriented novels like “Released Souls” and “A Discovery of Witches,” has swept aside the vampire as a symbol of power, glamour and style.

The Saint Laurent collection Hedi Slimane showed in Paris last fall, with its wide-brimmed hats, flowing capes and ethereal drifts of chiffon, had a whiff of sulfur about it. The line, as Mr. Slimane revealed, owed a debt to the kinds of self-anointed Gypsy sorceresses who thrived during the 1970s in subterranean Los Angeles, equal parts Stevie Nicks and Marjorie Cameron, the latter an urban legend in her day who painted pagan goddesses and dabbled in the occult arts.

Diaphanous frocks and mantles favored by Ms. Cameron, who died in 1995, and her spiritual kin have wafted into collections as diverse as those of Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, whose label, Skaist-Levy, was obliquely inspired by Ms. Cameron, and Thom Browne. With its chalk-faced models clad in white tights and sharp-shouldered goth-tinged frocks, Mr. Browne’s fall show in New York last month might have been an outtake from a Tim Burton film.

Fashion’s black-magic women are trading on something subtler than raw sex appeal.

“Maxidresses and capes are not really revealing a lot of skin,” said Hayley Phelan, the senior editor of the style blog Fashionista.com. Vaguely feminist in spirit, according to Ms. Phelan, “they’re celebrating a kind of beauty,” she said, “that maybe appeals more to other women than to men.”

Wiccan spirits surfaced at Gareth Pugh in London last week, draped in hooded capes and sweeping gowns with a distinctly pagan cast, and at Ann Demeulemeester and Rick Owens in Paris, each designer offering gauzy gowns and wraps that flirted with the dark side.

Jessica Rayne, a South African designer with a predilection for filmy black frocks trailing fringe and lace, has explored pagan imagery and lore as a source of romance.

“The witch is a strong character,” Ms. Rayne said, “encompassing what it is to be a woman: powerful and sometimes terrifying.

“She’s crazy but engaging,” Ms. Rayne went on, “the kind of woman you fall in love with, though it scares you to death.”

Tapping that sort of spooky drawing power, updated variations on ’90s hits like “Charmed” began appearing on small screens more than a year ago. “The Secret Circle,” though canceled after a season, has developed a cult nonetheless, as has the new Web series “13 Witches,” about a family of pagans with a thirst for revenge. 

Hollywood stepped in with “Hansel & Gretel,” in which the comely Famke Janssen portrays the witch as raven-haired temptress, and “Oz: The Great and Powerful,” with Rachel Weisz as Evanora, the Wicked Witch of the East. Scheduled for release early next year is “Maleficent,” its title character, Sleeping Beauty’s nemesis, fetchingly conjured by Angelina Jolie, whose crimson pout and leather-wrapped horns are lacquered to a sheen.