How goth evolved as a fashion subculture.

2. WHAT IS A GOTHIC SUBCULTURE?
• STARTED IN THE LATE 1970S AND EARLY 80S WHEN
ENGLISH GOTH ROCK, A DARK AND SOMBRE OFFSET OF
PUNK ROCK, WAS RISING IN POPULARITY
• NOTED BY ITS HARD GUITARS AND ITS OMINOUS AND
THEATRICAL SOUND.
• LOVERS OF GOTH ROCK, GOTHIC LITERATURE,
VICTORIAN AND MEDIEVAL HISTORY, AND
CONTEMPORARY HORROR CINEMATOGRAPHY
• THE PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW THIS SUBCULTURE ARE
KNOWN AS GOTHS.

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CROSS
PENTACLE
THE EYE OF HORUS
ANKH CROSS

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20. Duck feather dress,
Alexander McQueen,
The Horn of Plenty,
A/W 2009-10
•Goth fashion reached the ramp
with huge names as Alexander
McQueen, Rick Owens, Jean-
Paul Gaultier, Christian
Lacroix and Rodarte began
debuting Gothic looks in their
runway shows. [late 1990s &
early 2000s]
Rodarte’s gothic romance
AW16

23. •14 March – 2 August 2015.
Alexander McQueen: Savage
Beauty was the first and
largest retrospective of
McQueen's work to be
presented in Europe.
•McQueen’s use of gothic is
more multifaceted – it draws
on a broad vocabulary from
literary, cinematic, art and
fashion history to pose
important questions about our
relationships with our bodies,
about desire, about mortality.

24. •McQueen’s work speaks to our current
love of the gothic like that of no other
designer. Virtually all his work, from his MA
graduation show, Jack the Ripper Stalks
His Victims (1992), to his final unfinished
collection (autumn/winter 2010), inspired
by medieval ecclesiastical painting,
engages with the gothic on one level or
another.

25. •All his collections over the years
have some element of goth:
The Hunger (spring/summer 1996)
was named after the cult vampire film
starring Catherine Deneuve and
David Bowie and featured a
transparent, moulded plastic corset
encasing a layer of worms.
•Eclect Dissect, his autumn/winter
1997 show for Givenchy, was themed
around a fictitious Victorian surgeon
who collected women, animals and
clothes from around the world and cut
up and reassembled them.
•Supercalifragilistic (autumn/winter
2002), his tribute to Tim Burton,
mixed up Batman with Grimm’s fairy
tales and Marie Antoinette, and was
staged in the prison where the French
queen awaited the guillotine.
Supercalifragilistic
[A/W 2002]
The Hunger [S/S
1996]
Eclect Dissect
[A/W 1997]

26. •The most quintessentially gothic quality
of McQueen’s work is his fascination
with history
•The past also weighs heavy on the
present for McQueen, whether the
oppression of Scotland by England in
Highland Rape (autumn/winter 1995)
and Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter
2006), or the execution of an ancestor
as a witch in In Memory of Elizabeth
Howe, Salem, 1692 (autumn/winter
2007). This sense of troubling histories
working their way to the surface is
expressed in the clothes themselves: in
distressed fabric; screen-printed
photographs; fragments of historical
dress disassembled and reordered.
Alexander
McQueen Fall
2007
Alexander
McQueen Autumn
Winter 2006

27. •McQueen’s work is increasingly
read in the context of his own
troubled past. His legacy is far more
important than this. In his vividly
original use of a gothic vocabulary to
explore his own preoccupations, he
offers a distilled expression of the
preoccupations of our time.
Pictures from The
Romantic Gothic
Room

28. (n.d.). Retrieved September 5, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth_subculture