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My fashion thoughts for this issue of Helle come from a conversation I
vaguely had (i.e. I was drunk) with Victorian Helen about goth style
and fashion!
And so my darling space-children let us consider the following theme:
I was watching the video for This Corrosion last night, it features all four foot
one of Auntie Patricia, resplendant in leather, fishnet, and rags stomping about
the place in huge heels and generally pandering to thousands of adolescent fantasies.
There was a time when club-going girlies worked very hard to look like Ms.Morrison, or
like Siouxie or some other black clad sex demon. Those times were sad (they looked nice
but it was still very sad) as the look lacked originality, people copied an accepted
style of dress and hairstyle and makeup.
Then, and I think it was the summer of '89, a few people started to break the mould,
they dressed differently and, from a fashion point of view, things started to get
interesting again, these styles grew in popularity and...
...became the new standard of dress! Now I'm not going to say that everyone is dressing
the same and have turned into mindless lemmings with no style of their own. This is
because I'd like to be able to go out without being in constant fear of my life and
not because I don't believe it.
So let's set out to break the mould once again; why not completely change your appearance
next time you go out, set out to do something dramatic, to draw attention to yourself
in a 'look at me/I don't care' kind of way. There was a bloke at the Slimelight a
couple of weeks ago dressed as a St.Trinians style schoolgirl - he got more stares than
the tattooed and bemohawked types lurking in the corner, and this was from the other
denizens of the club.
I'm currently half way through an experiment which is partly recapturing my youth and
partly because I like being the centre of attention, which involves dressing almost
entirely in white and drinking 100% proof vodka.
Think about it, people don't stop and stare at goths anymore, we've become a constant
part of society and our fashions only draw stares from the most conservative and jaded.
There are many things you can do without stepping outside the outer limits of 'goth', and
who knows, perhaps you'll start a new fashion....
MY LITTLE PONIES
A History
Julie - a proto pony - circa '88
They've been around longer than you think. The women with OTT hair
extensions in violent colours, big heels, and a taste for purple drinks.
Christened "My Little Ponies" by either Jo or Brian (ex-Slimelight DJs)
they had already been shaking their hair all over dancefloors for some years.
So where did they come from, these tottering towers of hair and headache pills?
Sources close to our haircare expert suggest that they were the invention of 'Mahn'.
Described as a 'triangle in a frock' by our editor (who was drunk that year),
he specialised in turning passing goths into mutants in the darker recesses of the
legendary Kit Kat club. Still around, still unchanged, and still to be found with
a length of purple in his hands, he can nowadays be found lurking in the fetish clubs
of London.
Julie in the Niewendijk, Amsterdam '88
GOTHIC FASHION
It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that no two goths will agree on a definition of
anything even remotely connected with their subculture. This is doubly true of fashion as
Goth is a movement that has, despite the occasional collection with a vague nod in the
direction of nouveau gothique (the most recent examples being Maria Grachvogels black
silk crepe and chiffon, and Yohji Yamamoto s nylon crinolines), always managed to avoid
the mainstream.
The path of gothic fashion is different from city to city and indeed from country to country
with the American gothic contingent being more au fait with a Victorian or Edwardian retro look,
whereas the Europeans still lean towards a fetish-punk look. This, of course, is a
generalisation, and any number of current, ex, or old goths reading this will be thoroughly
incensed, citing any number of friends or acquaintances who do not conform to stereotype.
Let us go then, you and I, and look at the history of gothic fashion. Resisting the temptation
to mention Germanic tribes, French architecture, or Mary Shelley, we arrive at a back street in
London s Soho - in the years after punk and the over-dressed new romantic movement - to a club
called the Batcave where people were combining the two subcultures into something that combined
the stark nihilism of one with the peacock feather and mascara hedonism of the other. The
earliest goths (gothic-punks) still went in for the black leather and fishnet combination
which remains universal some fifteen years on, a few years later there was a brief spate of
glamour goths and gender-benders - one or two associated labels selling from Hyper Hyper and
Kensington Market, but it was then, and to a large extend still is today, a fashion without
labels.
The fabrics and looks have always been a constant, black velvet, black leather, black lace,
fishnet, and in more recent years PVC, combined with heavy make-up, and black hair. Despite
the common ground, these consumptive aesthetes have always struggled to look different, to
refine, customise, and in some cases redefine the look.
During the 80s there were other brief fads within the movement. For example. dressing like
villains from post-modernist westerns; inspired, however unlikely it seems, by the
Fields of the Nephilim to cover themselves with Homepride plain white flour! There was
another spate of cross-dressing, combined with long coloured or black hair-extensions.
During the summer of love , when Acid House and it s bastard offspring turned every market
stall from a bastion of black clothes to a sea of day-glo smiley faces, it seemed as if it was
all going to come to an end. Goth seemed to disappear from the playlists of clubs to be
replaced with by insipid indie music. The hairspray brigade were replaced with huge baggy
trousers and T-shirts. During the years that followed the goth and fetish scenes began to
intermingle even more than they previously had. Yet again another trend joined and affected
the scene and chains, PVC, and handcuffs joined the standard wardrobe of your average urban
goth.
In the last two years there has been a renaissance within the gothic subculture world wide.
Clubs are opening all over, there are goths in every city and in most towns even in the most
remote or unlikely places you can think of. The essential fashion is still developing in the
same-way it always has - a hybrid, which, on occasion, makes a brief gesture of goodwill to the
mainstream that it has steadfastly avoided (obvious recent examples would be the spate of
humorous logo T-shirts which would make Katherine Hamnet turn in her grave[1]).
On any Saturday night at the Slimelight, in London, England, it will be possible to spot
elements of every type of gothic fashion as you push your way through the black-clad masses to
the stone stairway leading up to the smoke filled dancefloor. You d be hard pressed to find
someone, male or female, who wears the same outfit twice, and harder pressed to find any of
the denizens who d be able to tell you who designed their dress. This, to a goth, doesn t
equate to having no sense of fashion; they could shop Olympically if it was a recognised sport;
the goths of then and now concentrate on image, on attitude, and, most importantly, on having
fun. Every goth is his/her own stylist, dictating their own seasonal collections, and
modelling the same along a strobe lit runway for everyone to see.
[1] If, in fact, she were dead.
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