The Philosophy of the Neogoth Subculture
Looking like they’re going to a funeral: Why the return of skulls and black clothing isn’t just a pose from TikTok and Wednesday, but a well-thought-out philosophy of life and death.
The origins of the Neogoth subculture can be traced back to around the year 2000 within the so-called Mall Goth and Cybergoth communities. However, their existence in the mainstream was short-lived. In the case of Cybergoth, one can hardly speak of entering the mainstream at all. The mass popularization of goth subculture offshoots arrived around 2020, when original TikTok E-girls adopted elements of the older Mall Goth style. This brought the current peak wave of so-called Goth Baddies into the mainstream. Before we can dive into the actual philosophy of Neogoth, we must strictly separate a fleeting visual trend from a subculture. Otherwise, we would slip into a superficial reduction of the entire movement to the series Wednesday and TikTok.
We must keep the nature of the mainstream in mind. It is subject to ever-faster changes, and the usual lifespan of mainstream subcultures today can therefore be estimated at roughly 6 years — 2 years of rise, 2 years of peak, and 2 years of fading out. Of this, only those mere 2 peak years truly count as mainstream. The reason for this rapid emergence, progression, and demise is not only the lightning-fast spread of information via the internet, but also the very nature of how alternative fashion evolves. Namely, it is a constant process of defining oneself against — and feeling an aversion to — the mainstream.
Let’s take Punk as an example. Punk is one of the primary, truly alternative (anti-mainstream), massively widespread subcultures. The essence of Punk was a complete rejection of the mainstream. Like most subcultures, however, it was swallowed up by the exact thing it fought against. The definitive death of a specific subculture — or at least when speaking of its fashion component — can be traced relatively easily. It occurs the moment clothing stores start selling subcultural attire that could previously only be obtained through one’s own creativity. To give an example, let’s look at Emo — as soon as Hot Topic started selling striped fingerless gloves, the death of the Emo subculture was sealed. The same applies to Punk. Safety pins, which symbolized resistance to the mainstream — specifically to what we consider earrings — lost their meaning the moment the first retail chain started selling safety pins as actual earrings.
Alternative clothing, even if it may briefly enter the mainstream, largely resists the ills of the ever-changing true mainstream. One cannot view the fashion of metalheads, which has not changed much over the last 20 years, in the same way as the perm, which was popular in the 1980s. Let us realize that difference — metal fashion is timeless, whereas a perm, including the iconic haircut, much like the man bun, is already attributed to bygone eras. Both the perm and the man bun are retrospective today. Metal fashion is retrospective only partially, and in many cases not at all. It is as if metal fashion was just as relevant 20 years ago as it is today, whereas the perm is already understood as a thing of the past, much like the iconic colorful transparent plastics of Y2K futurism. These retrospective things simply look old and evoke an inability to “keep up with the times.”
Of course, one cannot ignore the cyclical return of fashion. Most recently, we could observe this with the Mullet haircut, which is now slowly retreating from the mainstream and entering its fading phase (and anyone who denies that the Mullet is in retreat is lying to themselves). Similarly, we cannot rule out the phenomenon of individual retrospective styles, which, however, cannot be labeled directly as a subculture, since only the fashion is central to them. These include, for example, imitations of the aforementioned 1980s dress style, or even Rockabilly. However, these imitations have their own specifics. Their appeal lies in the fact that they look good on young people, or potentially on older people, but only under the condition that they are highly aestheticized. A young person who cuts their hair into a Mullet will simply look “stylish,” whereas an older man in his fifties who has worn a Mullet for 20 years and pairs it with a plain t-shirt and sweatpants looks almost ridiculous, even antiquated.
I have tried to show the differences and connections between subcultural fashion, timeless fashion, the mainstream, individual retrospections of a small number of people, and the often laughable fashion backwardness that lies in failing to maintain a unified style — thus inappropriately combining elements of everyday clothing with iconic elements of retrospective fashion.
Our view so far, however, has only glided across the surface, just as anyone willing to jump onto a new style every 6 years glides across the surface. The main topic of this essay is philosophy, to which we will now return after a long introductory detour.
The mainstream generally does not operate with the philosophy of subcultures. Punk will once again serve as a great example. Under this term, everyone imagines a colorful Mohawk, safety pins, leather jackets, plaid pants, and an iconic over-decoration in the form of badges and patches. The fashion style of Punk, like most other alternative styles, had its foundations in the very philosophy of this subculture. The message of Punk was the rejection of mainstream clothing and mainstream ideas in general. It was a radical resistance against authorities, individualism, and a rejection of the social system. A “true” punk differs from a “Hot Topic” / ready-made punk in that, according to their philosophy, they would refuse any purchase of punk clothing in fashion chains, because it would be in direct conflict with their conviction of rejecting the social system. Fashion chains inextricably belong to the social system. According to this philosophy, punk clothing is therefore fundamentally created as DIY (and this applies to most other subcultures that manifest themselves through clothing).
Get Lucas James Tóth’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But let’s finally get to the main point. How does it work with Neogoth? What is the philosophy of Neogoth, and how does Neogoth fashion materialize this philosophy? To prevent any misunderstandings, Neogoth, just like Punk and other subcultures, means something slightly different to each individual. So if I am now going to write about the philosophy of Neogoth, please bear in mind that this is what Neogoth means to me.
Anywhere on the internet, one can read a few general pieces of information about the philosophy of the Neogoth subculture. You will often come across the claim that: Neogoth philosophy is a modern, evolving school of thought focused on radical individualism, finding beauty in darkness, and rebellion against the superficiality of the mainstream. Neogoth is interested in the duality of existence, rebellion against norms, existential depth, and authentic self-expression. However, this is just a pile of meaningless words, and with a slight modification, this description could actually fit any subculture.
Let’s therefore look at the absolute visual foundation: the color black, graveyard and witchy aesthetics in a typical combination with dark streetwear. Neogoth abstracts a certain “graveyard-ness and witchiness” and wraps it in a streetwear vibe. Neogoth somewhat updates the graveyard and witchy nature of the Goth style. It gets rid of the lacy pomposity of classic Goth style, throws away the connotations of the Victorian era, Romanticism, and traditional mourning attire, and adopts the connotations of modern streetwear and light sci-fi, while rejecting the extreme neon sci-fi of Cybergoth. What remains is what Goth and Neogoth have in common — a melancholic awareness of the dark side of life, which is often pushed aside in ordinary society. Neogoth builds the foundations of its philosophy around death and negative melancholic emotions, making it, in a way, Schopenhauerian.
“Life without pain has no meaning,” wrote Schopenhauer in 1819. The general public often believes that Schopenhauer’s statement is some kind of nonsensical defense of pain. However, the quote is stripped of its context. Schopenhauer did not mean to say that pain should be the main meaning of life, which would rather evoke some BDSM fetish. On the contrary, Schopenhauer pointed out, for instance, that the concept of happiness is overly glorified and people do not realize its true nature — namely, that the feeling of happiness occurs the moment we remember unhappiness. Put another way — we could not feel happy if we did not also know what it feels like to be unhappy. We are unhappy when we feel pain, whether physical or psychological. And the moment we experience happiness, we feel good because we realize that we do not feel bad.
The glorification of happiness is just as problematic for the Neogoth subculture as it was for Schopenhauer. Putting the feeling of happiness on a pedestal as the only correct and valid emotion that anyone successful should have inevitably negates the correctness and validity of unhappiness — such as sadness, death, and other depressing feelings and realities. Sadness is pushed to the back burner; crying is hidden, we are ashamed of it, nobody wants to see it. Take a man crying in public, for example — for mainstream society, this represents the absolute decline of an individual. Illness and death are pushed aside in the exact same way.
The sick and dying are cleared away into hospitals and institutions. It is no longer true that people die at home surrounded by family. Even someone who dies at home is immediately taken away to the morgue. Yet in earlier times, it was normal for the whole family to gather around the deceased, easily for a matter of days, so they could say goodbye and accept the reality that this person is no longer with us. In the Czech Republic, an open casket is considered an absolutely bizarre thing. And yet, saying goodbye to the deceased face-to-face is one of the healthiest things one can do. When a person dies in a hospital, is taken to the morgue, and is subsequently buried or cremated in a closed casket, the family loses direct contact with the dead body, leaving an unresolved space in the soul. It seems to us almost as if the deceased person just went away on vacation somewhere and never came back. Morbid as it may be, the human brain needs to see the body of the deceased. Take dogs, for example, where it works similarly — they may look for their owner, who “just” left for the hospital, for weeks or months, because their brain did not receive the direct information that this person is no longer alive, and it cannot be explained to them in words.
Neogoth, just like Goth, pulls these things out of that seclusion, which is why skulls, moths, dried roses, and crosses are important to these subcultures as symbols of death. The color black as the color of mourning (not just for death), white makeup as a symbol of illness, and dark music as a channel through which the matter of many sidelined, yet inseparable from life, emotions — such as sadness and hopelessness — is conveyed. Skull decorations, whether human or animal, return the stigmatized dark side of the world to everyday life. They celebrate mortality, while mortality simultaneously implies rebirth. It is not for nothing that the wider public says negatively intended things to members of the Goth subculture and its offshoots, like “you look like you’re going to a funeral.” The purpose is precisely to provoke thought in these goth-rejecting people who, through no fault of their own, live in a world where death and sadness are hidden and driven out of everyday life. Or, at the very least, goth tries to re-inhabit death and sadness into society in a broader sense, because a more complex attempt to explain why one “dresses like going to a funeral” usually goes unheard. People have simply gotten used to not seeing death and sadness, or experiencing them at home behind closed doors where they “don’t bother” their surroundings with them. This, as I have already tried to explain including the example of the dog, leaves an unresolved space in people. These unresolved spaces then only deepen social dissatisfaction, as they constitute subconscious, long-term stress.
Let us recall, however, the list of those meaningless definitions, specifically “finding beauty in darkness.” If we were to take this literally, it is understandable that Goth philosophy meets with great rejection from the wider public. The usual understanding is that there is nothing beautiful about darkness — that is, for example, death. And that is true. The death of a loved one is exceedingly unhappy and unbeautiful, and anyone who would want to say that death is beautiful gives the impression of a mass murderer or someone who does not realize the gravity of the situation. I therefore reject “finding beauty in darkness” as a definition of the philosophy of the Goth subculture and all its offshoots. That phrase, “finding beauty in darkness,” is a cliché abstracted over the years and stripped of context. The Goth and Neogoth subcultures by no means celebrate death, nor do they try to make it beautiful. They simply return its presence to everyday life, trying to provide a resolution to that unresolved space in our souls through healthy public mourning. They rehabilitate the true meaning of the tradition of wearing black clothing when mourning, which today has become a mere convention where a person “must” wear black things after the death of a loved one so society doesn’t think they aren’t grieving — which overshadows the actual mourning that we have gotten used to performing in private.
Somewhere at this point, Neogoth turns away from Goth. We can probably agree that Goth, which derived its clothing from the fashion of the Victorian era and Romanticism, succumbs to a certain costume-like appearance, thereby distancing itself from everyday life. By abstracting elements of Goth and transferring them onto streetwear or other styles of dressing more common today, Neogoth truly fulfills one of the goals of its philosophy: the rehabilitation of death and sadness into society. While original punk died the moment people started buying ready-made “punk” clothing in retail chains, Neogoth defends itself against commodification through bricolage. Setting aside some of the more exaggerated Neogoth pieces that again smack of costumes (and thus aren’t really true Neogoth anymore), Neogoth clothing borrows ordinary fashion pieces, such as school skirts, and wraps them in dark colors and personal styling. By ripping these ordinary products out of their context, it creates that subversive DIY statement, a pop-culture reflection of which is, for example, Wednesday’s school uniform from the series Wednesday (2022).
But let us dive even deeper into the philosophy of Neogoth, because the aforementioned costume of the character Wednesday already leans more toward the mainstream and that Hot Topic phenomenon mentioned at the beginning. When a member of the Neogoth subculture — one who does not dress that way out of a mere fashion whim, but truly resonates with its philosophy — revolves their world so heavily around mourning, it is not just mourning for the dead. As I have already outlined, one can mourn for many other things. Neogoth also mourns for animals, for the state of society, for nature, for one’s soul oppressed by ideology (see Freud’s 1930 essay Civilization and Its Discontents). An animal skull hung on a wall is not an admiration of morbidity, but a statement for life, death, and rebirth. By wearing these symbols and setting them into everyday streetwear, a Neogoth literally becomes a walking memento mori. They are a permanent visual disruptor of false positivism in the streets of a city that tries to lock death away in hospitals. A Neogoth person does not understand death as the end, but as proof of life. Looking at the barren surface of the Moon or Mars is sadder for a Neogoth than looking at earth covered in bones, because a barren surface marks a place where no one and nothing has ever lived. The occult aesthetic embedded in Neogoth, in turn, materializes the spirituality we have lost in a modern society where hard science is the main religion.
The Neogoth subculture is liberal. It acknowledges the individual, yet simultaneously acknowledges society as a sum of individuals. It returns to nature, but rejects viewing a “return to nature” as something tied to the romanticized idea of a lonely cabin in the woods. It admits its existence within a civilized industrial society and puts on display the melancholy that everyone else stubbornly hides from the world. It fights for human rights in all directions because, by the very nature of its existence, it resists the societal dictate of normativity — yet it does not wrap them in the rainbow optimism of a utopian society where only happiness and love exist. A Neogoth dresses in symbols of death and mourning so that they can celebrate life together with others.
Translated from the original Czech.
