Goths at 40: the enduring appeal of bleakness and black lipstick (but not Kylie Jenner)
The subculture that’s always been a refuge for the sad kids who felt no one understood them keeps reinventing itself and is flirting with the mainstream, although it’s hard to sell something as downbeat as death
The Cure have been drawing massive crowds during their North American tour, so it seems a good opportunity to talk to goths, whose love of all things bleak, and of unattractive lipstick shades, never cease to fascinate the rest of America.
Outside New York’s Madison Square Garden, it’s easy to find a friendly family of goths – one current, two formers and their mum. (She just likes to wear black.) Ask them what being a goth means today, and you get an answer much like black-clad kids have been giving for the past 40 years.
Goth is realism, says Martin Willis, 23, who is wearing a black leather jacket and black lipstick, and whose green eyes are rimmed for an undead look.
“I see how the world is, and I just want to cry to no end,” he says.
Goths on Twitter
The goth subculture is remarkably hardy, having established itself as a kind of permanent other, the dark yin to America’s relentlessly optimistic yang. After its emergence in the late 1970s, its ethos of despair and decay travelled around the world, colonising places as diverse as Germany, Mexico and Japan, and setting up permanent camp in the United States, where the question of “what is goth?” has lately become fraught. Or maybe it always was.