Gothic aesthetics

Goth is a music-based subculture that began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. It was developed by fans of Gothic rock, an offshoot of the post-punk music genre. The name ''Goth'' was derived directly from the genre. Notable post-punk artists who presaged the gothic rock genre and helped develop and shape the subculture include: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division.

The goth subculture has survived much longer than others of the same era, and has continued to diversify and spread throughout the world. Its imagery and cultural proclivities indicate influences from 19th-century Gothic fiction and from horror films. The scene is centered on music festivals, nightclubs, and organized meetings, especially in Western Europe. The subculture has associated tastes in music, aesthetics, and fashion.

The music preferred by goths includes a number of styles such as gothic rock, death rock, cold wave, dark wave, and ethereal wave. Styles of dress within the subculture draw on punk, new wave, and New Romantic fashion. It also draws from the fashion of earlier periods such as the Victorian, Edwardian, and Belle Époque eras. The style most often includes dark (usually solid black) attire, dark makeup, and black hair. The subculture has continued to draw interest from a large audience decades after its emergence.

Music

Origins and development

The term ''gothic rock'' was coined by music critic John Stickney in 1967 to describe a meeting he had with Jim Morrison in a dimly lit wine-cellar, which he called "the perfect room to honor the Gothic rock of the Doors". That same year, the Velvet Underground song "All Tomorrow's Parties" created a kind of "mesmerizing gothic-rock masterpiece" according to music historian Kurt Loder. In the late 1970s, the ''gothic'' adjective was used to describe the atmosphere of post-punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Magazine, and Joy Division. In a live review about a Siouxsie and the Banshees' concert in July 1978, critic Nick Kent wrote that, concerning their music, " rallels and comparisons can now be drawn with gothic rock architects like the Doors and, certainly, early Velvet Underground". In March 1979, in his review of Magazine's second album ''Secondhand Daylight'', Kent noted that there was "a new austere sense of authority" in the music, with a "dank neo-Gothic sound". Later that year, the term was also used by Joy Division's manager, Tony Wilson on 15 September in an interview for the BBC TV programme's '' Something Else''. Wilson described Joy Division as "gothic" compared to the pop mainstream, right before a live performance of the band. The term was later applied to "newer bands such as Bauhaus who had arrived in the wake of Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees". Bauhaus's first single issued in 1979, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", is generally credited as the starting point of the gothic rock genre.

In 1979, ''Sounds'' described Joy Division as "Gothic" and "theatrical". In February 1980, ''Melody Maker'' qualified the same band as "masters of this Gothic gloom". Critic Jon Savage would later say that their singer Ian Curtis wrote "the definitive Northern Gothic statement". However, it was not until the early 1980s that gothic rock became a coherent music subgenre within post-punk, and that followers of these bands started to come together as a distinctly recognizable movement. They may have taken the "goth" mantle from a 1981 article published in UK rock weekly ''Sounds'': "The face of Punk Gothique", written by Steve Keaton. In a text about the audience of UK Decay, Keaton asked: "Could this be the coming of Punk Gothique? With Bauhaus flying in on similar wings could it be the next big thing?" The F Club night in Leeds in Northern England, which had opened in 1977 firstly as a punk club, became instrumental to the development of the goth subculture in the 1980s.

In July 1982, the opening of the Batcave in London's Soho provided a prominent meeting point for the emerging scene, which would be briefly labelled "positive punk" by the ''NME'' in a special issue with a front cover in early 1983. The term ''Batcaver'' was then used to describe old-school goths.

Outside the British scene, deathrock developed in California during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a distinct branch of American punk rock, with acts such as Christian Death and 45 Grave at the forefront.

Gothic genre

The bands that defined and embraced the gothic rock genre included Bauhaus, early Adam and the Ants, the Cure, the Birthday Party, Southern Death Cult, Specimen, Sex Gang Children, UK Decay, Virgin Prunes, Killing Joke, and the Damned. Near the peak of this first generation of the gothic scene in 1983, ''The Face'' Paul Rambali recalled that there were "several strong Gothic characteristics" in the music of Joy Division. In 1984, Joy Division's bassist Peter Hook named Play Dead as one of their heirs: "If you listen to a band like Play Dead, who I really like, Joy Division played the same stuff that Play Dead are playing. They're similar."

By the mid-1980s, bands began proliferating and became increasingly popular, including the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission, Alien Sex Fiend, the March Violets, Xmal Deutschland, the Membranes, and Fields of the Nephilim. Record labels like Factory, 4AD and Beggars Banquet released much of this music in Europe, and through a vibrant import music market in the US, the subculture grew, especially in New York and Los Angeles, California, where many nightclubs featured "gothic/industrial" nights. The popularity of 4AD bands resulted in the creation of a similar US label, Projekt, which produces what was colloquially termed ethereal wave, a subgenre of dark wave music.

The 1990s saw further growth for some 1980s bands and the emergence of many new acts, as well as new goth-centric U.S. record labels such as Cleopatra Records, among others. According to Dave Simpson of ''The Guardian'', " the 90s, goths all but disappeared as dance music became the dominant youth cult". As a result, the goth movement went underground and fractured into cyber goth, Shock rock, Industrial metal, Gothic metal, and Medieval folk metal. Marilyn Manson was seen as a "goth-shock icon" by ''Spin''.

Art, historical and cultural influences

The Goth subculture of the 1980s drew inspiration from a variety of sources. Some of them were modern or contemporary, others were centuries-old or ancient. Michael Bibby and Lauren M. E. Goodlad liken the subculture to a bricolage. Among the music-subcultures that influenced it were Punk, New wave, and Glam. But it also drew inspiration from B-movies, Gothic literature, horror films, vampire cults and traditional mythology. Among the mythologies that proved influential in Goth were Celtic mythology, Christian mythology, Egyptian mythology, and various traditions of Paganism.

The figures that the movement counted among its historic canon of ancestors were equally diverse. They included the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844‒1900), Comte de Lautréamont (1846‒1870), Salvador Dalí (1904‒1989) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905‒1980). Writers that have had a significant influence on the movement also represent a diverse canon. They include Ann Radcliffe (1764‒1823), John William Polidori (1795‒1821), Edgar Allan Poe (1809‒1849), Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), Bram Stoker (1847‒1912), Oscar Wilde (1854‒1900), H. P. Lovecraft (1890‒1937), Anne Rice (1941‒2021), William Gibson (1948‒), Ian McEwan (1948‒), Storm Constantine (1956‒2021), and Poppy Z. Brite (1967‒).

18th and 19th centuries

Gothic literature is a genre of fiction that combines romance and dark elements to produce mystery, suspense, terror, horror and the supernatural. According to David H. Richter, settings were framed to take place at "...ruinous castles, gloomy churchyards, claustrophobic monasteries, and lonely mountain roads". Typical characters consisted of the cruel parent, sinister priest, courageous victor, and the helpless heroine, along with supernatural figures such as demons, vampires, ghosts, and monsters. Often, the plot focused on characters ill-fated, internally conflicted, and innocently victimized by harassing malicious figures. In addition to the dismal plot focuses, the literary tradition of the gothic was to also focus on individual characters that were gradually going insane.

English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel ''The Castle of Otranto'' is one of the first writers who explored this genre. The American Revolutionary War-era "American Gothic" story of the Headless Horseman, immortalized in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (published in 1820) by Washington Irving, marked the arrival in the New World of dark, romantic storytelling. The tale was composed by Irving while he was living in England, and was based on popular tales told by colonial Dutch settlers of the Hudson Valley, New York. The story would be adapted to film in 1922, in 1949 as the animated '' The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad'', and again in 1999.

Throughout the evolution of the goth subculture, classic Romantic, Gothic and horror literature has played a significant role. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), Edgar Allan Poe "Severin admits his band (Siouxsie and the Banshees) pored over gothic literature - Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire". (1809–1849), Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), and other tragic and Romantic writers have become as emblematic of the subculture as the use of dark eyeliner or dressing in black. Baudelaire, in fact, in his preface to ''Les Fleurs du mal'' (''Flowers of Evil'') penned lines that could serve as a sort of goth malediction:

''C'est l'Ennui! —l'œil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,''
''Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.''
''Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,''
''—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!''

It is Boredom! — an eye brimming with an involuntary tear,
He dreams of the gallows while smoking his water-pipe.
You know him, reader, this delicate monster,
—Hypocrite reader,—my twin,—my brother!

Visual art influences

The gothic subculture has influenced different artists—not only musicians—but also painters and photographers. In particular their work is based on mystic, morbid and romantic motifs. In photography and painting the spectrum varies from erotic artwork to romantic images of vampires or ghosts. There is a marked preference for dark colours and sentiments, similar to Gothic fiction. At the end of the 19th century, painters like John Everett Millais and John Ruskin invented a new kind of Gothic.

20th century influences

Some people credit Jalacy "Screamin' Jay" Hawkins, perhaps best known for his 1956 song "I Put A Spell on You," as a foundation of modern goth style and music. Some people credit the band Bauhaus' first single "Bela Lugosi's Dead", released in August 1979, with the start of goth subculture.

21st century

The British sitcom ''The IT Crowd'' featured a recurring goth character named Richmond Avenal, played by Noel Fielding. Fielding said in an interview that he himself had been a goth at age fifteen and that he had a series of goth girlfriends. This was the first time he dabbled in makeup. Fielding said that he loved his girlfriends dressing him up.

Characteristics of the scene

Icons

Notable examples of goth icons include several bandleaders: Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Banshees; Robert Smith, of the Cure; Peter Murphy, of Bauhaus; Rozz Williams, of Christian Death; Olli Wisdom, leader of the band Specimen and keyboardist Jonathan Melton aka Jonny Slut, who evolved the Batcave style. Some members of Bauhaus were, themselves, fine art students or active artists. Nick Cave was dubbed as "the grand lord of gothic lushness".

Fashion

Influences

One female role model is Theda Bara, the 1910s femme fatale known for her dark eyeshadow. In 1977, Karl Lagerfeld hosted the Soirée Moratoire Noir party, specifying "tenue tragique noire absolument obligatoire" (black tragic dress absolutely required). The event included elements associated with leatherman style.

Siouxsie Sioux was particularly influential on the dress style of the Gothic rock scene; Paul Morley of ''NME'' described Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1980 gig at Futurama: " iouxsie wasmodeling her newest outfit, the one that will influence how all the girls dress over the next few months. About half the girls at Leeds had used Sioux as a basis for their appearance, hair to ankle". Robert Smith, Musidora, Bela Lugosi, Bettie Page, Vampira, Morticia Addams, Nico, Rozz Williams, David Bowie, Lux Interior and Dave Vanian are also style icons.

The 1980s established designers such as Drew Bernstein of Lip Service, and the 1990s saw a surge of US-based gothic fashion designers, many of whom continue to evolve the style to the present day. Style magazines such as ''Gothic Beauty'' have given repeat features to a select few gothic fashion designers who began their labels in the 1990s, such as Kambriel, Rose Mortem, and Tyler Ondine of Heavy Red.

Styling

Gothic fashion is marked by conspicuously dark, antiquated and homogeneous features. It is stereotyped as eerie, mysterious, complex and exotic. A dark, sometimes morbid fashion and style of dress, typical gothic fashion includes colored black hair and black period-styled clothing. Both male and female goths can wear dark eyeliner and dark fingernail polish, most especially black. Styles are often borrowed from punk fashion and—more currently—from the Victorian and Elizabethan periods. It also frequently expresses pagan, occult or other religious imagery.Eric Lipto
Disturbed Shooters Weren't True Goth
from the Chicago Tribune, 27 April 1999 Gothic fashion and styling may also feature silver jewelry and piercings.

Ted Polhemus described goth fashion as a "profusion of black velvets, lace, fishnets and leather tinged with scarlet or purple, accessorized with tightly laced corsets, gloves, precarious stilettos and silver jewelry depicting religious or occult themes". Of the male "goth look", goth historian Pete Scathe draws a distinction between the Sid Vicious archetype of black spiky hair and black leather jacket in contrast to the gender ambiguous guys wearing makeup. The first is the early goth gig-going look, which was essentially punk, whereas the second is what evolved into the Batcave nightclub look. Early goth gigs were often very hectic affairs, and the audience dressed accordingly.

In contrast to the LARP-based Victorian and Elizabethan pomposity of the 2000s, the more Romantic side of 1980s trad-goth—mainly represented by women—was characterized by new wave/post-punk-oriented hairstyles (both long and short, partly shaved and teased) and street-compliant clothing, including black frill blouses, midi dresses or tea-length skirts, and floral lace tights, Dr. Martens, spike heels (pumps), and pointed toe buckle boots (winklepickers), sometimes supplemented with accessories such as bracelets, chokers and bib necklaces. This style, retroactively referred to as ''Ethergoth'', took its inspiration from Siouxsie Sioux and mid-1980s protagonists from the 4AD roster like Elizabeth Fraser and Lisa Gerrard.

''The New York Times'' noted: "The costumes and ornaments are a glamorous cover for the genre's somber themes. In the world of Goth, nature itself lurks as a malign protagonist, causing flesh to rot, rivers to flood, monuments to crumble and women to turn into slatterns, their hair streaming and lipstick askew".

Cintra Wilson declares that the origins of the dark romantic style are found in the " Victorian cult of mourning." Valerie Steele is an expert in the history of the style.

Reciprocity

Goth fashion has a reciprocal relationship with the fashion world. In the later part of the first decade of the 21st century, designers such as Alexander McQueen, Anna Sui, Rick Owens, Gareth Pugh, Ann Demeulemeester, Philipp Plein, Hedi Slimane, John Richmond, John Galliano, Olivier TheyskensLa Ferla, Ruth: "Embrace the Darkness". ''New York Times'', 30 October 2005

and Yohji Yamamoto brought elements of goth to runways. This was described as "Haute Goth" by Cintra Wilson in the ''New York Times''.

Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Jean Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix have also been associated with the fashion trend. In Spring 2004, Riccardo Tisci, Jean Paul Gaultier, Raf Simons and Stefano Pilati dressed their models as "glamorous ghouls dressed in form-fitting suits and coal-tinted cocktail dresses". Swedish designer Helena Horstedt and jewelry artist Hanna Hedman also practice a goth aesthetic.

Critique

Gothic styling often goes hand in hand with aesthetics, authenticity and expression, and is mostly considered to be an "artistical concept". Clothes are frequently self-designed.

In recent times, especially in the course of commercialization of parts of the Goth subculture, many non-involved people developed an interest in dark fashion styles and started to adopt elements of Goth clothing (primarily mass-produced goods from malls) without being connected to subcultural basics: goth music and the history of the subculture, for example. Within the Goth movement they have been regularly described as "poseurs" or "mall goths"''.''

Films and television

Some of the early gothic rock and deathrock artists adopted traditional horror film images and drew on horror film soundtracks for inspiration. Their audiences responded by adopting appropriate dress and props. Use of standard horror film props such as swirling smoke, rubber bats, and cobwebs featured as gothic club décor from the beginning in The Batcave. Such references in bands' music and images were originally tongue-in-cheek, but as time went on, bands and members of the subculture took the connection more seriously. As a result, morbid, supernatural and occult themes became more noticeably serious in the subculture. The interconnection between horror and goth was highlighted in its early days by '' The Hunger'', a 1983 vampire film starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. The film featured gothic rock group Bauhaus performing ''Bela Lugosi's Dead'' in a nightclub. Tim Burton created a storybook atmosphere filled with darkness and shadow in some of his films like ''Beetlejuice'' (1988), ''Batman'' (1989), ''Edward Scissorhands'' (1990), ''Batman Returns'' (1992) and the stop motion films ''The Nightmare Before Christmas'' (1993), which was produced/co-written by Burton, and ''Corpse Bride'' (2005), which he co-produced. The Nickelodeon cartoon ''Invader Zim'' is also based on the goth subculture.

As the subculture became well-established, the connection between goth and horror fiction became almost a cliché, with goths quite likely to appear as characters in horror novels and film. For example, '' The Craft'', ''The Crow'', ''The Matrix'' and ''Underworld'' film series drew directly on goth music and style. The dark comedies ''Beetlejuice'', ''The Faculty'', '' American Beauty'', ''Wedding Crashers'', and a few episodes of the animated TV show ''South Park'' portray or parody the goth subculture. In ''South Park'', several of the fictional schoolchildren are depicted as goths. The goth kids on the show are depicted as finding it annoying to be confused with the Hot Topic "vampire" kids from the episode " The Ungroundable" in season 12, and even more frustrating to be compared with emo kids. The goth kids are usually depicted listening to goth music, writing or reading Gothic poetry, drinking coffee, flipping their hair, and smoking.

Morticia Addams from The Addams Family created by Charles Addams is a fictional character and the mother in the Addams Family. Morticia was played by Carolyn Jones in the 1964 television show ''The Addams Family'' and by Anjelica Huston in the 1991 version, and voiced by Charlize Theron in 2019 animated film.

A recurring sketch in the 1990's on NBC's ''Saturday Night Live'' was ''Goth Talk'', in which a public access channel broadcast hosted by unpopular young goths would continually be interrupted by the more "normal" kids in school. The sketch featured series regulars Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Chris Kattan.

Books and magazines

A prominent American literary influence on the gothic scene was provided by Anne Rice's re-imagining of the vampire in 1976. In ''The Vampire Chronicles'', Rice's characters were depicted as self-tormentors who struggled with alienation, loneliness, and the human condition. Not only did the characters torment themselves, but they also depicted a surreal world that focused on uncovering its splendour. These Chronicles assumed goth attitudes, but they were not intentionally created to represent the gothic subculture. Their romance, beauty, and erotic appeal attracted
many goth readers, making her works popular from the 1980s through the 1990s. While Goth has embraced Vampire literature both in its 19th century form and in its later incarnations, Rice's postmodern take on the vampire mythos has had a "special resonance" in the subculture. Her vampire novels feature intense emotions, period clothing, and "cultured decadence". Her vampires are socially alienated monsters, but they are also stunningly attractive. Rice's goth readers tend to envision themselves in much the same terms and view characters like Lestat de Lioncourt as role models.

Richard Wright's novel ''Native Son'' contains gothic imagery and themes that demonstrate the links between blackness and the gothic; themes and images of "premonitions, curses, prophecies, spells, veils, demonic possessions, graves, skeletons" are present, suggesting gothic influence. Other classic themes of the gothic are present in the novel, such as transgression and unstable identities of race, class, gender, and nationality.

The re-imagining of the vampire continued with the release of Poppy Z. Brite's book '' Lost Souls'' in October 1992. Despite the fact that Brite's first novel was criticized by some mainstream sources for allegedly "lack nga moral center: neither terrifyingly malevolent supernatural creatures nor (like Anne Rice's protagonists) tortured souls torn between good and evil, these vampires simply add blood-drinking to the amoral panoply of drug abuse, problem drinking and empty sex practiced by their human counterparts", many of these so-called "human counterparts" identified with the teen angst and goth music references therein, keeping the book in print. Upon release of a special 10th anniversary edition of ''Lost Souls'', ''Publishers Weekly''—the same periodical that criticized the novel's "amorality" a decade prior—deemed it a "modern horror classic" and acknowledged that Brite established a "cult audience".

The 2002 release ''21st Century Goth'' by Mick Mercer, an author, noted music journalist and leading historian of gothic rock, explored the modern state of the goth scene around the world, including South America, Japan, and mainland Asia. His previous 1997 release, ''Hex Files: The Goth Bible'', similarly took an international look at the subculture.

In the US, ''Propaganda'' was a gothic subculture magazine founded in 1982. In Italy, ''Ver Sacrum'' covers the Italian goth scene, including fashion, sexuality, music, art and literature. Some magazines, such as the now-defunct ''Dark Realms'' and ''Goth Is Dead'' included goth fiction and poetry. Other magazines cover fashion (e.g., ''Gothic Beauty''); music (e.g., ''Severance'') or culture and lifestyle (e.g., ''Althaus'' e-zine).

On 31 October 2011, ECW Press published the ''Encyclopedia Gothica'' written by author and poet Liisa Ladouceur with illustrations done by Gary Pullin. This non-fiction book describes over 600 words and phrases relevant to Goth subculture.

Brian Craddock's 2017 novel Eucalyptus Goth charts a year in the life of a household of 20-somethings in Brisbane, Australia. The central characters are deeply entrenched in the local gothic subculture, with the book exploring themes relevant to the characters, notably unemployment, mental health, politics, and relationships.

Graphic art

Visual contemporary graphic artists with this aesthetic include Gerald Brom, Dave McKean, and Trevor Brown as well as illustrators Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, Lorin Morgan-Richards, and James O'Barr. The artwork of Polish surrealist painter Zdzisław Beksiński is often described as gothic. British artist Anne Sudworth published a book on gothic art in 2007.

Events

There are large annual goth-themed festivals in Germany, including Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig and M'era Luna in Hildesheim), both annually attracting tens of thousands of people. Castle Party is the biggest goth festival in Poland.

Interior design

In the 1980s, goths decorated their walls and ceilings with black fabrics and accessories like rosaries, crosses and plastic roses. Black furniture and cemetery-related objects such as candlesticks, death lanterns and skulls were also part of their interior design. In the 1990s, the interior design approach of the 1980s was replaced by a less macabre style.

Sociology

Gender and sexuality

Since the late 1970s, the UK goth scene refused "traditional standards of sexual propriety" and accepted and celebrated "unusual, bizarre or deviant sexual practices". In the 2000s, many members "... claim overlapping memberships in the queer, polyamorous, bondage-discipline/sadomasochism, and pagan communities".

Though sexual empowerment is not unique to women in the goth scene, it remains an important part of many goth women's experience: The "... ene's celebration of active sexuality" enables goth women "... to resist mainstream notions of passive femininity". They have an "active sexuality" approach which creates "gender egalitarianism" within the scene, as it "allows them to engage in sexual play with multiple partners while sidestepping most of the stigma and dangers that women who engage in such behavior" outside the scene frequently incur, while continuing to "... see themselves as strong".

Men dress up in an androgynous way: "... Men 'gender blend,' wearing makeup and skirts". In contrast, the "... women are dressed in sexy feminine outfits" that are "... highly sexualized" and which often combine "... corsets with short skirts and fishnet stockings". Androgyny is common among the scene: "... androgyny in Goth subcultural style often disguises or even functions to reinforce conventional gender roles". It was only "valorised" for male goths, who adopt a "feminine" appearance, including "make-up, skirts and feminine accessories" to "enhance masculinity" and facilitate traditional heterosexual courting roles.

Identity

While goth is a music-based scene, the goth subculture is also characterised by particular aesthetics, outlooks, and a "way of seeing and of being seen". The last years, through social media, goths are able to meet people with similar interests, learn from each other, and finally, to take part in the scene. These activities on social media are the manifestation of the same practices which are taking place in goth clubs. This is not a new phenomenon since before the rise of social media on-line forums had the same function for goths. Observers have raised the issue of to what degree individuals are truly members of the goth subculture. On one end of the spectrum is the "Uber goth", a person who is described as seeking a pallor so much that he or she applies "... as much white foundation and white powder as possible". On the other end of the spectrum another writer terms "poseurs": "goth wannabes, usually young kids going through a goth phase who do not hold to goth sensibilities but want to be part of the goth crowd..". It has been said that a "mall goth" is a teen who dresses in a goth style and spends time in malls with a Hot Topic store, but who does not know much about the goth subculture or its music, thus making him or her a poseur. In one case, even a well-known performer has been labelled with the pejorative term: a "number of goths, especially those who belonged to this subculture before the late-1980s, reject Marilyn Manson as a poseur who undermines the true meaning of goth".

Media and academic commentary

The BBC
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