Your Own Style

  As a goth, one of the most important things is to develop your own style, this is what separates Victorian Goths from Industrial Goths and what brings the two together, should someone decide to borrow from both for their personal style. There are many different types of gothic style labels that have been used to describe how certain goths dress, Industrial, Victorian, Cybergoths, Deathrockers, and many other labels, and there are other goths that fit under many of these labels, or none of them, but there is never an original goth look, no one could copy Siouxsie Sioux, Peter Murphy, or Andy Biersack without adding some of their own style and ideas (I hope so at least, imitation has been called the sincerest form of flattery, but copying someone, down to the perfectly plucked eyebrows, is creepy on so many levels.) Developing your own personal style can be as simple as ordering a shirt with a band logo designed by you off a website, or as complex as tearing apart a pitch black garment and sewing it back together with blood red thread, which is very deathrocky, by the way. My style is usually composed of black band t-shirts, black bracelets (usually with a band's logo), torn jeans, necklaces, and a pair of sneakers that look like they've seen war, but I occasionally change up my style a bit, just so I don't get bored of it.
      Developing your clothing style is a very important part of the goth subculture, but there are, as there are and always will be... to everything, roadblocks that you might encounter when putting together your perfect, horror-laced wardrobe. If you go to a school that has one of those dress codes where you can only wear collared shirts and are not allowed to wear jeans, that definitely takes a big chunk out of the fun of having a gothy wardrobe, it did for me, even though I was able to find ways to get around it. For example, I would wear a black button-down shirt over a band t-shirt and leave the top three or four buttons undone, so the band name and logo were slightly visible, or I would wear my signature black army jacket (or at least it became so, since I wore it practically all winter, when my friends looked for me in the hall, they didn't bother to look for my face, they looked for a faded, black army jacket) over a black polo. Along with the clothing, you could do other things to establish your gothiness without being sent to the principal's office for a lecture (oh, how I hate lectures) on the dress code, and be told, in detail, how you are breaking it, these ways have been tested by me and my friends, and they do work. Necklaces, pins, brooches, dyeing your hair (if your school allows that), painting your nails (if your school allows that), eyeliner, piercings (if your school allows either one of those, sorry, I'm just making sure, the school I went to allowed that, but I have heard some horror stories about schools whose superiors want their students to look completely generic and indistinguishable from each other, something that borders on torture for us black-clad, eccentric types). After you've done all you can to establish yourself as a goth in your annoyingly strict education area, make plans for whenever there is nothing regulating how you can dress but your own tastes in clothing, whenever you can truly dress to mirror your tortured soul.
        Now its time to talk about a more powerful regulator, your parent figure, no; seriously, like it or not, your parents may not be on board with how you want to dress, they may believe some of that garbage that's out there about goths, they may be worried that you will be bullied for how you dress, or maybe its a more self-centered notion; maybe they are afraid they will be called bad parents. Any of those reasons can be easily helped, I'm going to give you some tips, for a more in depth explanation on reassurance, consult my Avoiding The Freak-Out post. To assure your parents that goth is nothing like the media would have them believe , explain to them what draws you to goth, explain that goth isn't a religion or a cult and you should be fine. If your parents are afraid that you will be bullied, show them that you have been following my advice and not giving a crap about what people have to say about you, and really follow it, these people have no right to criticize you about what you wear or how you act, so you shouldn't care, because caring will only fuel their taunts. But if your parents are afraid of being considered bad parents, its your turn to lecture THEM. They need to learn to stand behind you, because they're your parents, if you've already explained to them what goth really is, there is no reason why they should be ashamed of your new subcultural following, they should learn to stick up for you when other adults criticize you (and maybe them), and they should be proud that you are your own person.
        Well, my friends, this is where I end this post, live free, face the world with courage, and don't take crap from anyone, these people have no right to make fun of you, so you shouldn't care about it.

Signed,
The Darker Son