May 3, 2023 |
The belly of the Merrion Centre in Leeds probably wouldn’t strike you as somewhere the world’s first goth club, Le Phonographique, called its home. An imposing, brutalist behemoth of a building, the shopping centre looms large over the West Yorkshire city, its gloomy, grubby halls now lined with chain stores, bargain shops, fast food joints and a particularly dingy outpost of Morrisons. But in 1979, the Phono became a pioneering night out, running for 26 years until its closure. Walking through the fluorescent-lit space today, there are no clues to its history as the place the Yorkshire gothic movement of the 1980s found its feet, or its legacy as a subcultural meeting point where teen goths would head to find community, get drunk on snakebite and lose their minds on the dance floor to the Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Yorkshire has a history with the dark and gothic, of course. Bram Stoker set Dracula in the seaside town of Whitby, where to this day you can visit its hugely popular, annual Goth Weekend. It’s held just before Halloween, obviously.
From the late ’70s into the early ’80s, the goth scene had exploded globally. From New York to London and Los Angeles, black-clad kids piled into dim enclaves like the East Village’s Pyramid Club and legendary Dean Street club night The Batcave, faces painted ghostly white, eyes smudged with kohl, hair teased and backcombed into gravity-defying mohawks and mullets. Though the cornerstones were the same – black, and lots of it – the aesthetic varied depending on where you looked. LA’s goths took inspiration from the silver screen, for example, going for a darkly elegant, vampiric Hollywood glamour, while London’s lot were more punky, scrappy and DIY.
Owing to the economic downturn of Thatcher’s Britain in the ’80s, much of the look was likely to be thrifted, as goths largely turned to charity shops and second-hand stores to kit themselves out. Victorian-style circle skirts were layered over silk petticoats and matched with lace-trimmed blouses, while slim, velvet dress coats were paired with bondage-inspired trousers and beaten-up leather jackets were layered with band tees and slashed jeans. For those with a bit more cash at their disposal, Vivienne Westwood, Ann Demeulemeester and the new wave of avant-garde designers trickling in from Japan – like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto – were among the discerning goth’s go-tos.
By the time the ’90s rolled around, the goth scene in its original form had largely diminished. Dismally, in the UK at least, the pounding financial hangover of the ’80s saw countless indie venues go bust and slam shut their doors, leaving dedicated goths – as well as alt kids from other countercultural groups – with far fewer places to hang out and get weird. The aesthetic shifted, too. As fashion entered an era of stripped-back minimalism, and designers like Calvin Klein proposed jeans and a T-shirt as the height of style, the gothic pendulum swung in the direction of band tees, hoodies and baggy jeans.
“I would have loved to wear the kind of stuff the early goths in the ’80s wore,” says Rachel Stephenson, who grew up as a teenage goth in Huddersfield. “But, as clichéd as it sounds, there was nowhere for us to hang out beyond bus stops and outside the local shopping centre. My friends and I got harassed enough by ‘normies’ without looking like something out of Dracula,” she adds, laughing. Instead, her chosen look was a black hoodie bearing Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson album covers and tour graphics, a floor-sweeping pair of jeans picked up on trips to the Leeds Corn Exchange and a full-length leather trench coat, the lapels of which were punctured with scores of pin badges. “Every once in a while, when we’d go into Leeds to go to Phono or The Cockpit, I’d swap my T-shirt for a PVC or pleather corset.”
Through the late ’90s and into the ’00s, the goth aesthetic took endless twists and turns, splintering off into countless sub-categories. Cult classic Hackers (1995) and influential sci-fi The Matrix (1999) marked the dawn of the cyber goth, while the 2010s ushered in the era of the “health goth”. Infiltrating the landing pages of Tumblr and Lookbook.nu, and pioneered by the likes of Rick Owens and Alexander Wang, the look saw dark athleisure-wear combined with gothic mainstays like leather moto jackets, as fashion fans across the globe turned into an army of green juice-drinking turbo goths.
Whereas Owens is an almost lifelong committed goth – he’s not nicknamed the Lord of Darkness for nothing – it’s the industry’s commodification of the aesthetic that turned plenty of dedicated teen goths away from the subculture. “Obviously you grow up and your interests change, but a big thing for moving away from the whole goth and emo thing for me was because everyone started doing it,” says Grant Hurst, who grew up just outside London and spent his weekends in the early 2000s traipsing up and down the length of Camden High Street, half-drunk can of Monster in hand.
“I wasn’t one of the original goths, sure, but I was into the music and the scene. More and more you’d see people coming to Camden to get the look without understanding where it came from. I would never want to gatekeep and, who knows, maybe that was a stepping stone to getting more into goth, but it was enough for me.” Though he left a more avant-garde aesthetic behind, Hurst peppers his wardrobe where he can with “darker” pieces from designers like Raf Simons, Owens and Yamamoto.
The goth look may have splintered and evolved – for better or worse, depending on your viewpoint – but it hasn’t lost any of its appeal. With high and fast fashion alike still besotted by the aesthetic, Demna continues to churn out goth and metal band hoodies and tees, slapping £1,000 price tags on the kind of Rammstein merch you could easily pick up at their gigs for £50. In AW22, Donatella Versace and Nicola Brognano of rejuvenated Italian house Blumarine examined the look through a Y2K lens, respectively sending vampy brides and Hot Topic mall-goth girlies down the Milan runway.
In January, Dean and Dan Caten of Dsquared2 also got in on the act, as they debuted a 2000s-indebted collection inspired by high school cliques, including goths and emo kids, alongside jocks, nerds and prom queens. Hammering home the intensification of fashion’s love for the dark side, sitting front row at Saint Laurent’s AW23 men’s show in Paris was Jenna Ortega. Shrouded in an inky, all-black look comprising a floor-length column gown with an attached hood and an incomparably tailored Le Smoking jacket, the star of Netflix’s runaway Addams Family offshoot Wednesday is luring a whole new generation of teens to the dark side and music by artists like The Cramps.
But while gothic clothing may have been commodified by fashion since its inception in the early 1980s, the subculture still bubbles authentically under the surface. At club nights like London’s Slimelight – going strong in its fourth decade – and queer fetish event Klub Verboten, elements of goth, punk and kink are colliding, as always, on dance floors and in darkened corners, as alt fans get creative with their looks. There, bondage gear and latex that leaves next to nothing to the imagination rubs up against full-on vampiric ensembles and steampunk-inspired looks. “Whatever the aesthetic might be, and wherever the subculture might go, the freaks and weirdos of the world will always find a way to gravitate towards each other,” surmises Hurst. “That’s what being a goth was always about.”
Taken from issue 70 of 10 Magazine – ROMANCE, REBEL, RESISTANCE – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
THE CULT
Photographer LEONARDO VELOCE
Fashion Editor DAVEY SUTTON
Models EVA at XDirectn, SASHA KRIVOSHEYA and HARRY BROWSE at Elite Models, LIN YAP at Models1, SAFE CRANE at Established Models and ERIK at Milk Management
Hair MIKE O’GORMAN at Saint Luke
Make-up JO FROST using Lisa Eldridge Beauty
Photographer’s assistant WAYNE MAURICE
Fashion assistants DOMINIK RADOMSKI, ALEX TRILLO
and JAHNAVI SHARMA
Hair assistant TAKUMI HORIWAKI
Make-up assistants JODIE JACOBS and FRANCESCA LEACH
Casting CHLOE ROSOLEK
Production NICHOLAS RODGERS
Special thanks to SARAH HIRAKI, EDWARD LYON, DOUGLAS and REVEREND LAURA JOY FAWCETT at ALL SAINTS CHURCH
Jewellery throughout by OUIE, SHAUN LEANE, R&M LEATHERS, GREGORY KARA and DOSISG6C
