Gothic Origins
How a Byzantine tribe became an aesthetic
I do not spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. I specifically tend not to like Roman History podcasts because they are mostly quite bro-y. But the T&J podcast is a rarity in the landscape of Roman history podcasts: the limited series is an independent passion project of Berlin-based journalist Christine Laskowski, and it is centered around the radical romance and partnership of Empress Theodora and her husband, the Emperor Justinian. But it is also committed to understanding the cultural dynamics of the Byzantine era.
In one of her more recent T&J episodes titled ‘Gothic as a Modifier,’ Christine takes her listeners on the journey of the word ‘goth,’ and how the name of an ancient barbarian people evolved to evoke an entire fashion subculture. It was so fascinating, that I asked Christine to make a version of this story here for you.
So I’ll let Christine take it over from here!
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T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, and I think for that reason, I have come to think of April – with its rainclouds and crocuses, its Aries and Tauruses – as also the gothiest month.
I am not going to explain what goth means to you. You know what it means. “Goth” has been a well-known understandable style, before every little microtrend had its own name.
But as an ancient history enthusiast, the name "goth" began to nag at me. The Goths were, in history, an actual barbarian tribe. The Goths, whose origins were Ukraine and Bulgaria and the northern Black Sea region, by the 4th century AD, were in many ways the most formidable of all the many European tribes. They had sacked Rome and later been given Italy to rule … as a gift!
One thing that became clear to me as I was being educated on their history for T&J was that the Goths, as a people, were not dark. Or at least they weren’t dressing in all-black and ornamenting their buildings with gargoyles. Clearly, the Goths neither invented, nor exhibited, the aesthetics we currently associate with their name. So what gives? How did Goth go from this to this?
As an AOI fan, you’re probably already aware of what Queen Victoria did for the color white. But what I hadn’t realized before researching this episode, was that Queen Victoria may have also single-handedly done more for the color BLACK than Johnny Cash, Irving Schott, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, and Amy Winehouse combined.
Because before Queen Victoria, when it came to dressing in mourning attire following the death of a loved one, that was really only something aristocrats and royalty would do, because before the mass production of clothes, specialty mourning garments were prohibitively expensive. But after Victoria, following the death of her husband and soulmate, Albert, in 1861, Queen Victoria committed to wearing black every day, for the remaining 40 years of her life. And people noticed!
Now, due to the popularity and availability of ladies magazines and mass market textiles, people all over England and its former colonies began to emulate Victoria’s black-as-mourning-attire example. By 1900, all social classes started to demand mourning clothes, to the point where department stores like Lord & Taylor added mourning departments. So the all black look grew. Especially for widows.
So that’s what the Victorians — mainly women Victorians — were wearing. What they were reading was a lot of “Gothic fiction,” like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897. But the birth of the “gothic fiction” genre can all be traced back to a single, common ancestor: The Castle of Otranto, which may be the most important work in the history of fiction that you’ve never heard of. Yet, this has not stopped it from being more-or-less continuously in-print since its debut in England on Christmas Eve in 1764.
Upon the release of the book’s second edition, The Castle of Otranto’s author made a seismic decision, which was to add to its title page, the subtitle: ‘A Gothic Story.’
Horace Walpole, the author of this book, was an English Lord who was also a Gothic architecture obsessive. In fact, Horace Walpole loved Gothic architecture so much that he spent years and many thousands of British pounds converting his estate, Strawberry Hill, into a Gothic wonderland; thereby single-handedly kicking off the Georgian Gothic revival movement in England and effectively reviving Gothic as a popular architectural style! Strawberry Hill is also very clearly the inspiration for Walpole’s own fictional castle in The Castle of Otranto.
So what is Gothic architecture?
The person credited with designing the first-ever Gothic structure was a man named Suger in 1144 AD. And the structure that he gave the first-ever gothic glam up to (the pointed arch, the ribbed vault, and an excessive amount of stained glass) was St. Denis, a French monastery founded in the early 600s. Did Suger look upon St. Denis in 1144, fold his arms with satisfaction and say, ‘I’m gonna call this style I’ve created … Gothic’?? No, no he did not.
For a long time, this style was simply known as ‘the French Style.’ Which was seen as a rebellion against the “classical” (Italian/Byzantine) style. But then, along came a Renaissance Italian who, in the 1530s, would alter the course of history by insulting both the Goths and the French in a single go.
Giorgio Vasari, a renowned historiographer, wrote that just as the barbaric Goths had destroyed the classical world, so had this “French style” approach destroyed the architecture of the 12th century onward! To quote Vasari directly: ‘Then arose new architects who, after the manner of their barbarous nations, erected buildings in that style which we call Gothic.’
‘That style which we call Gothic’ is the royal ‘we’ because no one actually called it that, yet. Nevertheless, something about the pairing — like chocolate and peanut butter, like Gram and Emmylou — something about it resonated and, as we all know, the name Gothic stuck. And thanks to his book, Walpole popularized it. He also sort of changed it.
Whether he meant to or not, Horace Walpole inverts the meaning of the gothic castle. In his story, Walpole turns The Castle of Otranto from a place of safety and security into a place of sexual predation, spirits, and secrets. A fortress that, rather than repel, keeps people in.
Now, what kind of people tended to enter a castle of their own will based on promises of protection only to discover that they’d been lied to, that they are sexual prey and they’re also unable to leave? Well, those people — more often than not — tended to be women. And It would also be women who would continue the Gothic literary tradition with absolute fucking classics: Mary Shelley and Jane Austen in 1818 with the publications of Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey. Emily and Charlotte Brontë would come along thirty years later in 1847 with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
And the Brontë’s, they were Victorians. And like a pocket of warm, rising air a bird needs to soar, the Victorians would be that warm air, giving ‘gothic’ as a modifier yet another critical lift. Wearing black, reading their dark novels.
These brooding Victorian women set the template for a wave of babes who were romantically linked with the dead. Now, they still weren’t necessarily called goth then, but their aesthetic — the pale skin, dark makeup, dramatic black clothes — created the first primetime space for the Goth look.
The Addams Family is named after its creator, Charles Addams. Who was a cartoonist. These cartoons of an ooky, spooky alt-family first appeared in the pages of the New Yorker magazine all the way back in 1938. And they directly went on to inspire imitators.
Maila Nurmi, a.k.a. Vampira, became the very first late night female horror TV host, for Channel 7 in Hollywood. Tall, willowy, with skin that had never made Vitamin D, with long pitch black hair, an impossibly small waist and a long, deep v-necked black dress, Vampira fashioned herself after Morticia Addams, but not the TV Morticia, who didn’t exist, yet, but rather the cartoon Morticia, who had become known in print.But she soon would find a new life…
The Addams Family premiered on ABC on September 18, 1964. Giving us the gift of Gomez and Morticia Addams as well as their two kids, Pugsley and Wednesday Addams. And then get this- just days after The Addams Family enters the homes of millions of Americans via their television sets, on CBS, the TV show The Munsters premieres. Seriously, within the span of a week in 1964, we went from no TV goth families to two TV goth families. What a time to be alive!
***Haight Ashbury hippies serving repurposed Victorian LEWKS!
But it should be said, Vampira and the Addams Family goth look didn’t come out of nowhere. These were inspired by our dear friends, the Victorians. Because, the hippies, as you’ve also learned from the AOI episode on paisley, had a serious penchant for wearing Victorian garb. Hippies would wear these original pieces that were found at thrift stores or in grandma’s attic: overcoats and big, pirate-y blouses, which of course very much informed the aesthetic of the Addams Family … as well as a new band called The Doors.
Gothic isn’t just about wearing black. We also tend to associate it with a sound. It’s a movement associated with music. Particularly dark and tortured music. And that connection didn’t happen until March of 1967. Thanks to a music critic named John Stickney, who had penned a piece with the seminal, albeit underwhelming title, of: ‘Four Doors to the Future: Gothic Rock is Their Thing.’
Now, I was unable to locate the article in its entirety online, but the excerpts I’ve read point to Stickney’s desire, like any good critic, to paint an accurate portrait of this new band, The Doors. The lead singer, Jim Morrison, whose own gender fluid damsel-ification checks a major Gothic criteria box, was often clad in tight black clothing. In his turtlenecks and leather, with his cascading, curly dark hair, Jim Morrison was young, and he was beautiful … And he was also trapped in a labyrinth that he fought to escape each and every time he performed. I mean, have you listened to The End?
‘Morrison is at his best,’ Stickney wrote, ‘and staggered blindly across the stage as the lyrics and screams … poured out of his mouth: malevolent, satanic, electric, and on fire.’
Stickney, the music critic, didn’t just pair “gothic” and “rock" together because it sounded alliterative and cool, although it most certainly does. The Doors were a gothic rock band based on everything gothic had grown to mean up until that point. Although now, the Doors, as captured by Stickney, had imbued it with a little something extra. Now, gothic could also be: ‘malevolent, satanic, and electric.’ It was a performative rock style coupled with an aesthetic.
Music critics and historians latched onto what ‘gothic’ conveyed about Jim Morrison and the music of The Doors as a touchstone and a reference-point and, really, a way to sell the thing. Because now the utility of ‘goth’ was even greater, stretching far beyond what a single band (The Doors) and its frontman (Jim Morrison) were doing, to include a whole collection of artists and bands coming out of the late 70s and early 80s post-punk scene: Klaus Nomi, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the bands Magazine, and Bauhaus. ‘Goth’ captured the music, but it also captured a cohesive style. During a 1979 performance, even Joy Division’s own manager, while on the BBC, described his band’s music as ‘gothic’ compared to the pop mainstream.
Now, how did we go from Jim Morrison to a whole subculture of teen goths ripe-for-the-mocking? By the time I was growing up in the 90s, Goth would be the subject of frequent derision on some very popular TV shows. From daytime talk show host Jenny Jones’ style interventions to Saturday Night Live’s very own … Goth Talk. How did this all turn into shopping for pentagram necklaces and black lipstick at the mall? Or, as my friend Elizabeth and fashion industry insider so aptly put it: ‘How did we eventually get to the Hot Topic of it all?’
One clue actually lives in that 1999 SNL Goth Talk sketch I linked to above, which featured none other than the actress and episode guest-host, Christina Ricci. Arguably, it was Christina Ricci, who did more than anyone to make the smart, saturnine goth girl truly iconic. Shout out! Because Ricci became the new soul of Wednesday Addams. In two 1990s film adaptations.
For the uninitiated, Hot Topic was the store in the mall — in the days of the mall — where the Goth kids shopped. The way the preppy kids shopped at The Gap, and the skaters at Spencers. Talk about factions.
The Montclair, California company opened its first store in 1989, and Hot Topic early on seized an opportunity to sell band T-shirts specifically for goth bands. Like Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure. Which were in high demand from suburban fans who had trouble accessing them. But the young retailer also specialized in accessories, which is how they pretty soon began to notice something else going on.
Which is that among the jewelry and handbags and sunglasses, they also had a section for some of the edgier stuff: spiked wristbands, collars, crucifixes, things with skull and dragon designs … and that shit was just flying off the shelves. Not by the powers of Satan, mind you, but supply and demand!
And Hot Topic owner Orv Madden was like, ‘O.K!’ And decides he’s gonna alter the direction of his new business to cater to alternative looks. So not only goth, but before you could shop online, Hot Topic was one of the few places a goth kid living in the ‘burbs could go.
And who was immortalizing goth kids in the ‘burbs at the time? Why, that would be none other than director, Tim Burton, who had himself been a monsters-obsessed goth kid growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1960s, and turned it into a career.
Now, in interviews, at least in the many I’ve seen, Burton never uses the term to describe his own work. However, Burton’s Batman remake, his film Beetlejuice in 1988 and Edward Scissorhands two years later, no question revamped the gothic for mainstream American — as well as global — audiences. Who ate it up.
Two of those films starred actress Winona Ryder, whose role as the beloved goth girl, Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice was an overt homage to the Wednesday Addams character. Who, we already know, would later be played by Christina Ricci! That Ricci would star as both Wednesday Addams and the emo-goth daughter of a ghost-hunter dad in the film Casper, why, the 90s were serving us some serious goth movie stars! And the thing about movie stars is that ever since we first had them … we have wanted to look like them. And dress like them. And where did people shop to do that? Mainly, Hot Topic.
Although, it should be noted that by the mid-to-late 90s, the goth look was … witchier. Largely, I believe, because it coincided with the Satanic panic. Hard to get more counterculture than that! Replacing the adolescent obstreperousness of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz and Ricci’s Wednesday Addams, we get the mature, wild-eyed, black magic spell-casting Faruza Balk of the 1996 film The Craft. And we also get the music of antichrist superstar, Marilyn Manson.
The gothic look is still going strong! And Hot Topic remains a rarity in retail as an actually, solidly profitable business. Their cornering of this very niche market and having this really well-established brand is working really well for them, and it has for a really long time. And the look still has an appeal today, according to my very accomplished fashion friend Elizabeth Kuzila, who helped me compile this contemporary list:
Thom Browne. One of the best examples of gothic fashion recently comes in the Thom Browne Fall 2024 presentation, which was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ and was set to a recording of the poem. The models were walking around the set with a representation of the gothiest of birds in the center.
Madame Web. We also see some gothic fashion on red carpets. While Marvel’s Madame Web is definitely not a gothic-themed movie, the actresses all wore some really wonderful pieces that were inspired by spiderwebs that are a great jumping off point for inspiration for gothic fashion in both your eveningwear and maybe even your daywear.
Lisa Frankenstein. What is a gothic-themed movie is screenwriter Diablo Cody’s latest teen comedy/horror masterpiece set in the 80s. The 2024 film is not only centered on a new interpretation of the classic gothic novel, but under Zelda Williams’ direction, has Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands as some serious inspo.
Dolls Kill and Black Milk. In terms of retail, Hot Topic is always going to be the primary source for your ‘mall goth’ fashion. But there’s been some really fun competitors out there like Dolls Kill, which has been around for over a decade, and Black Milk in the UK, which gives a girlier spin on the gothic trends.
TikTok Style Tribes. And lastly, what’s really fun about gothic fashion is the interplay on social media, particularly on TikTok where original goths can be found interacting with new, younger goths. And, the gothic trendsetters can be seen working within the parameters of all kinds of different fashion trends to bring goth to people who maybe want to experiment with it but aren’t fully committed to the goth look. So, things like, the soft girl trend being changed into soft goth, or jokingly taking the tradwife concept and experimenting with what they would call tradgoth or traditional goth. Seeing this style tribe continue to grow and iterate on itself in real time on social media is wonderful.
As I wrap up this journey of the word gothic — wrap it up in luscious black velvet, of course — I have to say how surprised I was by how actually appropriate the name Goth truly is in representing a tragic, misunderstood counterculture, which made me love the tribe and the trends all the more! Because ‘goth’ doesn’t mean dark — although it can — so much as it means oppositional. Oppositional to whatever’s mainstream. And the gothic, in the west, at least, has functioned as a kind of counterweight that is at times so culturally necessary, not only does it fundamentally alter the mainstream, it sometimes takes the mainstream down with it.
Because the Goths may have lost the war against the Romans, but they did not go down alone. 🖤🔥
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Thank you so much, Christine. And as you can imagine, there’s so much more to this story. Definitely download the episode of T&J called ‘Gothic as a Modifier’ on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen
Are we skipping over The Cure, Rocky Horror, and how punk led to goth? Anne Rice's novel Interview with the Vampire came out in 1976, way before Tim Burton's films, not to mention Flowers in the Attic. Even if it wasn't depicted on a screen it was the inspiration for so many baby goths I knew
Amazing insight! Thank you.