Tish Weinstock on finding solace in the darkness: ‘Goth is a mentality’

When you’re young, it can feel like you’re the only person ever to experience the things you are going through, to suffer pain and heartbreak, to feel like an outsider looking in on life from the shadows. But actually, these things that you’re feeling are a fundamental part of the human condition, experienced more times over by more people than you could ever know. It’s something that you learn when you start consuming art, films, music and, of course, books. “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive,” as James Baldwin wrote in 1964.

From the outside, Tish Weinstock’s new book, How to Be a Goth: Notes on Undead Style, is a manual – a how-to guide on goth fashion, beauty and culture. But inside, as it traces the history of the goth aesthetic via the women who did it the best, what you are actually finding amongst the pages is solace. You are not the first person to feel alone, lonely, hurt, different, weird, ugly, disenfranchised, self-loathing, or melancholic. You’re part of a long tradition of women who have sought comfort in the darkness; women who have all lived on their own terms and who outwardly expressed their feelings of otherness through their fashion and beauty. “We are the weirdos mister,” as Nancy from The Craft famously said.

Weinstock is someone who has spent her life hidden, “physically, emotionally, spiritually and aesthetically”, in the solace of the shadows. As a writer, beauty editor, and (now professional) goth, she has dedicated her career to exploring alternative expressions of beauty and fashion, expertise which she now brings to this book. Profiling “goth-coded”, as she puts it, women like Louise Brooks, Michèle Lamy, Siouxsie Sioux, Edith Sitwell and Miss Havisham, Weinstock shows there’s no one prescriptive way to be a goth but many ways to express yourself in this harrowing and unyielding world. “The pain of simply existing is something we can all relate to, which is why the state of being goth traverses time and space,” she says. 

Dazed spoke to Weinstock about her lifelong commitment to darkness, the importance of seeing older goths and how the subculture will evolve in the future.

You were a child goth, is that fair to say?

Tish Weinstock: Yes, in a sense. There are goths who are linked to a specific music, youth culture, club and sartorial scene. I wasn’t alive in the 80s, when the goths were first born. But my idea of goth is someone who identifies outside of the mainstream and errs aesthetically, emotionally, spiritually, physically towards dark matter. So, in my definition, I was yes, but I want to also stress that in no way did I want to be prescriptive with this book and say, ‘This is what a goth is’. Goth is a mentality and a mindset. It’s something that you can tap into.

Why do you think you were drawn to it so young? Were you a dark child?

Tish Weinstock: I mean, I wasn’t cutting up animals, but I think with my dad dying when I was super young, death was very much a presence in the household, whether I understood what it meant age five or six is unclear, but death was a thing that I was aware of. My mum was grieving and my sisters were grieving, and we got special treatment because of it at school. Everyone asked how we were. It was drawn attention to, and I guess I internalised some of that macabre-ness, morbidity and this interest and preoccupation with death and darkness.

Goths have often been ostracised, did you find that when you started experimenting with more alternative looks?

Tish Weinstock: Yeah, 100 per cent. Boys were not interested in me. People made remarks like, ‘Oh you look scary.’ That was quite hard to reconcile but I was also happy. I wanted to both simultaneously scare people, but also attract them. I didn’t want to look like everyone else, but then I also did. I was holding two ideas at the same time simultaneously. I think when you’re younger, you have all these conflicting emotions.

It would be a lie if I said I’ve always been unapologetically myself. There have been moments where I’ve felt like a loser and ostracised because I look different and weird. But then, as I get older, it’s cliche, but confidence does come with age.

People think goth is a youth centric aesthetic, but in your book you show different life stages of being a goth, older goths.

Tish Weinstock: After I had a kid, I had a freak out. I was like, ‘What do I wear? How do I be taken seriously as an adult?’ So I went really minimalist, basically trying to use style as a way to consolidate this new identity, which was a mother. There’s this idea that women over a certain age have to be invisible. But this siren call of the goth, the allure, it never goes away.

The women who I talk about [in the book] who are over a certain age, they do not wither away. They take up even more room, like Edith Sitwell, she was not a goth but she kind of was, because of the way she refused to shy away from life and was so eccentric. The Marchesa Casati, in her later years, used to put Belladonna in her eyes to make her pupils dilate, which is insane. But she was committed to being eccentric, to being herself. Michèle Lamy clearly doesn’t give a fuck what other people think of her.

Why do you think the goth aesthetic has endured for so long, and is something that people keep being drawn to?

Tish Weinstock: The goth aesthetic is a celebration of darkness. I think there’s something very primal and primitive within mankind that makes us obsessed with the unknown and darkness and death. Horror and frightening things are also used as a way to control people, in terms of morality – the monster will eat you if you don’t do this. People have been telling each other stories about scary things for a long time. There’s something kind of thrilling about the darkness and monsters and people that are other.

Why are we having this gothic revival now? The world is going to shit post-Covid. We all had to reckon with this pandemic that threatened to kill everyone. We are on the brink of environmental oblivion, there’s so many religious wars, in the UK, there’s Brexit, the housing crisis. Across the board, the planet is not in a good place. And I think culturally speaking, we’re reflecting these anxieties with lots of dark subject matter. We’re reflecting all this stuff that’s going on through culture, it’s a way of coming to terms with it.

When goth started in the 80s, it was very tied to a music scene, which it no longer is. Aesthetics, in general, no longer have that root in a music scene or an art scene which sets the modern goth apart from previous generations.

Tish Weinstock: I think that’s exactly it. The subculture was so specifically tied to a musical scene and the aesthetics came after the music shifted. It was punk and glam rock giving way to this much more sinister sound. So the music came first, and then the look followed, whereas now I think we’re very much in a post-subcultural era because of the internet. I don’t really think subcultures can exist in the sense that once something’s online, by its very definition, it is viral and it’s accessible to all.

We’re also less tribal now. It’s all about the individual, even though we live in this very homogeneous era where everyone kind of looks the same. We think about ourselves as individuals, as opposed to a group of people – we’re not mods or rockers anymore. We live in a much more visual world than ever before, and so it’s about how you look versus what music you’re into.

Did you learn anything about goths that you didn’t know while researching for the book?

Tish Weinstock: With all of the women who stood out to me, there was this common thread – rebelling against the mainstream and rebelling against these stereotypical ideas of how women should look and behave. I learned about what drives people to do great things.

I haven’t mentioned Isabella Blow yet and what I loved about Isabella Blow is that she thought she was hideous, and she clearly felt like her skin was crawling, she killed herself really tragically. But we all think she was amazing and that she looked so incredible. She couldn’t really see that and I think that is a very goth mentality. I don’t think you choose to stick out. I think you’re just born sticking out and you feel really awkward. And then you lean into that awkwardness. That was a theme of all the people that I looked at, and indeed, the gothic subculture itself.

This article was originally published 18 October 2024.