At the Batcave in the 80s, no one knew what a goth was. “Boys just wore makeup because girls liked boys with makeup,” says Jon Klein, former Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist and founder of the Batcave club night, Soho’s cobwebbed birthplace of the London goth. Four decades later, and the goth aesthetic still permeates culture: ‘whimsigoth’ has become a popular Vinted search word, Matières Fécales has climbed to the top of Paris Fashion Week, while a flourishing electroclash scene is populated by solid steel crucifixes.

Back in 1982, word of the Batcave tore through the squatting scene with macabre gusto, until Nick Cave, Robert Smith and the band Bauhaus were among its attendees. Soon, Klein was selling Batcave t-shirts designed with BOY London, the cult punk label founded in 1976. But when Klein opened the Batcave at a strip club and propped up a coffin for the door, he didn’t anticipate a petri dish that spawned a global aesthetic – he wanted a DIY hangout for his band Specimen to play on Wednesday nights and dress up. “Wearing black in bohemian poverty culture is an easy way to make everything match,” he recalls, now 66 years old. 

Back then, goth was outré to the extreme. If a young person with a head of hairspray and a face as chalky as a Georgian socialite hailed a taxi, they would likely be turned away – possibly beaten up. But the movement was obscurely defined, Klein explains. “The Batcave had zero brand awareness,” he remembers, fondly. Word spread by flyers that littered the floors of Kensington Market, the legendary alt shopping arcade home to the era’s tattoo artists and maverick fashion labels, which got demolished in 2001.

Now, in 2026, the Batcave merch worn by the first-ever goths makes a comeback thanks to a collaboration with the 80s postpunk brand Pure Sex, which was revived this year after a three-decade hiatus. Founded by Dave Darcy in the mid-80s after he vacated his position as director of BOY London, Pure Sex channelled fetish and zine culture in a way that, Darcy feels, BOY no longer did. The boutique, with its studded harnesses and vinyl dresses, became the new counter-cultural breeding ground. To them, true style began in struggle and in attitude. Last Saturday night at Aro Archive in Shoreditch, we met the minds behind its comeback: Gareth Long, director of BOY’s 2012 revival, art director Joe Sangre and Darcy himself. For one week only, Aro Archive will host a pop-up exhibiting previously unseen Batcave archive garments and selling reproductions.

From the originals like Klein with their iconic tales, to a younger generation dressed in Pure Sex merch, all ages mix at the launch party. What becomes clear is that goth today is less a simulacrum of the past than a nod to it – each rendition adds a new layer without simply imitating it. The defining sound was once rock bands like Joy Division, but that’s now superseded by electronic groups such as Molchat Doma. Young Londoners dance at darkwave night Necropolis and art rave Inferno, without wishing they had been born earlier.

Elsewhere at the launch-turned-reunion, Blitz Club founder Rusty Egan is playfully hounding Batcave founder Klein. “Didn’t I get you signed?” he jokes. “Didn’t I get you a record deal?!”. Before the Batcave there was the Blitz Club, where Bowie-inspired New Romantics like Princess Julia danced to glam rock. Derek Ridgers, who at the time worked for Time Out’s nightlife section, told us: “Happening right after the New Romantic scene – which could certainly be a bit snooty and exclusive at times – the Batcave seemed to let anyone in. It was a very relaxed and friendly place, inclusive to everyone and not just the nascent goths.”

Darcy shows us a photograph of a shop assistant in shimmery makeup and a red vinyl biker jacket perched on the leopard print counter. “It was more of a continuous party than a shop,” he says of his old boutique in Kensington Market. An editor of the fetish magazine Skin Two and founder of a lasciviously named brand, Darcy confesses to having “lots of unhealthy interests.” The postpunk scene was full of “people who make their look, their style and their life a work of art,” he recalls. “All I ever wanted was to wake up next to them in the morning.”

Logomania was in its heyday when BOY’s confident graphic logo found prominence in the 70s. Darcy continues: “We were just trying to dress our friends. But I got scared of success. I remember seeing three arseholes in Birmingham wearing BOY, and I thought: I’ve got to stop working for BOY. That’s when I started Pure Sex.” In his view, BOY had deteriorated into being tacky and commercial, void of its original provocative spirit. With the Pure Sex relaunch, he hopes to avoid that same fate. But to him, this isn’t a revival: “I’m not looking to recreate the past. I’m looking to take parts of it and use the ideology for the present.”

“You probably see the 80s as quite mythological now?” a random man at the party asks wryly. “Phones preclude anything underground from lasting now.” Gen Z’s nostalgia is far from baseless romanticisation. Subcultures, and the fashion that shaped them, thrived in an era when DIY spaces, like the Batcave and Kensington Market, were still abundant. By looking back in time, we’re reminded of the existential threat fast fashion and property development pose to identity-making. You can buy a mass-produced grunge outfit from Shein in seconds, but you can’t ship an entire scene to your doorstep. The Batcave t-shirt is a relic from when merch was for repping your own club night, or supporting your friend’s band – not part of an industry that rips motifs from the underground and sells the aesthetic back to us.