Fashion

Musically and aesthetically, Goth emerged from the bleak and disillusioned post-punk era of Britain in the early eighties. Whilst both Punk and Goth responded to what they saw as the fracture and failure of society, their disillusionment found expression in different moods.

In a previous article, we established that across a range of theoretical perspectives, there is a tendency for commerce and media to be associated with cultural superficiality or fluidity rather than substantive subcultural groupings as defined in this series.

The origin of the word Goth is connected to the Roman Empire but has little or nothing to do with the subculture. Goths were a Germanic tribe who helped in the defeat of the Roman Empire. In contrast, the gothic novel of the eighteenth-century is a pioneer of the modern understanding of the term gothic by being a genre related to the mood of horror, morbidity and darkness.

Imagine Jules Verne as an inventor instead of an author. Imagine Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, a submarine capable of speeds rivalling modern Seawolf-class attack submarines, as a reality. Imagine Frank Reade as historical figure instead of a fictional persona; imagine his steam-powered robots as a fact of the American frontier. Envision a world where the speculative dreams of Victorian and Edwardian writers like Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs were realities instead of fantasies, and you begin to see the world through steampunk lenses.

It can easily be thought that members of Goth subcultures are not able to run a serious business and only run their business for fun and maybe to gain some profit or just as a past-time activity.

For Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, clothes were a mere aesthetic ornament, but emblems of society’s hierarchy and symbols of the spirit.

Divides between fans of Goth music in the mid-1980’s to late 1990’s split them into different waves and groups of Goths. While the music is the foundation of the Gothic subculture, the fashion and particular interests of its members are the branches of it.

In this article, I will first address the Gothic Lolita trend in terms of the notion of dressing up and the presentation of the spectacular, non-normative presentation of self or multiple selves. Next, I will examine this specific dressing up activity by the fashion tribe of Gothic Lolitas in terms of their assumed Gothic inspired identities. Finally, I will fuse these themes together by suggesting that although quintessentially Japanese in origin, the Loli-Goth or Goth-Loli tribes in South East Asia, as a form of cultural hybridisation, have significant connections and share parallel universes with their global Goth-Loli sisterhood and other neo style tribes, whilst adopting their own unique cultural take on their appearance and lifestyle underpinning this distinctive sartorial practice.

The Gothic has never been more alive than it is today. Like a contagion, of late, it has travelled across cultural and media landscapes to permeate even the most banal aspects of everyday living. While the Gothic has undoubtedly regained its popularity, it is also granted acknowledgement in “higher” culture.

“Arriving early, I wander through the mostly-empty space at yet another Friday-night Goth event in this dingy downtown nightclub. I encounter a young man clad in tight-fitting black pants, with bone-white decorations in half-skeleton arrangement. His black t-shirt features an Orthodox cross in outline. Text within the cross reads ‘Sleep is the cousin of death’ — a reference to sixteenth-century poet Charles Sackville. We exchange pleasantries in respectful, if awkward, anticipation of the louder atmosphere that has yet to coalesce.”