Goth Glam Has Risen From The Dead
This summer, while others had tracks such as ‘espresso’ by Sabrina Carpenter or Tems’ ‘Love Me JeJe’ on repeat, I fell in love with something a little darker: ‘Lullaby’ by The Cure, released in 1989. The strings and bassline make the song epicand immersive – just the thing to block out spiralling to-do lists on a morning commute. The lyrics, meanwhile, are positively frightening: concerning a monster on the prowl. ‘It’s much too late to get away or turn on the light,’ croons singer Robert Smith. ‘The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight.’
‘Lullaby’ is hardly an appropriate soundtrack for beach days and Aperol dates, and it’s pretty out of character for me, someone with a relatively sunny disposition and an enthusiastic approach to colour. But it does chime with what fashion has in store for this winter, as all things gothic come back into the frame.
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A darkness bled like ink across autumn/winter 2024 as designers drew on a wide range of influences. Prada, Valentino and Khaite all presented a black-focused colour palette. Others had positively ghoulish inspirations: 16Arlington’s Marco Capaldo cited Charlie Fox’s 2017 book This Young Monster, while Simone Rocha’s show, titled ‘The Wake’, looked to Victorian funerals. At Preen, Thea Bregazzi and Justin Thornton referenced a classic of the gothic genre: Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein.
To really understand the new mood, look to the resurgence of Tim Burton style. The director’s career now spans almost 40 years, with films including The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd all leaning towards the gothic. 1988’s Beetlejuice is the epitome of this aesthetic, thanks to 17-year-old Winona Ryder as archetypal goth girl Lydia Deetz, whose commitment to the look was such that she wore a blacklace veil to dinner. Fans will be thrilled that the long-awaited sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, arrives this month, no doubt serving up further outfit inspiration.
If Gen X adopted Ryder as their goth icon, Gen Z have Jenna Ortega. In a win for cross-generational relations, both appear in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Ortega is, of course, the star of Burton’s 2022 Netflix show Wednesday, which reimagines the story of the melancholic girl from the classic 1960s TV series The Addams Family. Viewed by around 150 million households, Wednesday introduced younger audiences to the Burton look, as Ortega took it from the screen to the red carpet. Playing on the ebony colour palette of the show and adding a smoky eye, she was hailed as the poster girl for the ‘goth glam’ aesthetic. The black-tulle dress from the famous dance sequence, meanwhile, has become a DIY project for those far more qualified than me on TikTok.
These crafty creators won’t have towait until the second season (out in 2025) for their Wednesday fix. Costumes from the show will go on display at the Design Museum this autumn as part of ‘The World of Tim Burton’, a new exhibition opening at the end of October. The dance-scene dress – a 2021 Alaïa piece purchased on Bond Street by costume designer Colleen Atwood – will be on show, along with the striped school uniform Wednesday wears for lessons at Nevermore Academy and photographs, sketchbooks and sets from across Burton’s filmography.
Curator Maria McLintock says gothic style is a key concept explored in the exhibition, but maintains that the gloomy associations are not necessarily something Burton is on board with. ‘Tim says he really doesn’t like the word “dark” being used in conjunction with his work,’ she says, comparing his thinking to storytellers from different eras. ‘Someone like Virginia Woolf, for example, who said there’s lightness in the dark.’
Burton is, of course, far from the first creative to explore the gothic aesthetic. It flourished in the 19th century, when writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins, Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë produced masterpieces of the genre. The goth music subculture,
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