A magazine to inspire a goth’s fashion sensibility
Maybe the devil wears Prada in the posh offices of Vogue, but at Gothic Beauty magazine, the devil wears a red miniskirt made of PVC plastic, a strap-up corset, ripped fishnet stockings, knee-high black leather boots with five belts per shin and a latex bracelet with winged eyeballs, accessorized with a lovely, coffin-shaped Demonia handbag.
Gothic Beauty is a quarterly fashion magazine for goths, published in Portland, Ore.
But Gothic Beauty is more than just a fashion magazine. It covers the gamut of goth lifestyle and culture, which includes furniture made with pieces of old Chevy Impalas, and Krypt Kiddies dolls with fangs and horns and a “bonus baby blood bottle,” and the music of bands including Scum and Android Lust, and the scents of goth perfumes such as Graveyard and Crypt.
Years ago, when Gothic Beauty interviewed AntiSally, who created Graveyard and Crypt, the magazine asked the question on everybody’s lips: “How did you come up with the idea to make unusual scents?”
“I live next to a beautiful graveyard,” AntiSally explained. “The smell of the grass, the flowers and the soil when it is dug up to make way for a new resident has always been present in my home. Graveyard was the first of the fragrances I formulated. The rest came to me when I thought of smells I associate with good things.”
OK, OK, we know what you’re thinking right now: Why do goths need a fashion magazine anyway? If you want the goth look, all you have to do is pierce half your bodily appendages, tattoo the other half, stay out of the sun long enough to get a corpse-like pallor, swab on enough black eye shadow to look like you haven’t slept since the Reagan administration, then put on some black clothes and, bingo, you’re good to go.
But that is soooo wrong.
“When most people hear the term ‘goth,’ they think of vampires, crushed black velvet, lacy Victorian gowns and pale skin,” Jonathan Williams writes in the latest issue of Gothic Beauty. “But recently, goth fashion has been infiltrated by forward-thinking styles more reminiscent of futuristic science fiction than fantastical images of past eras.”
For your postmodern, post-millennium goths, the whole all-black thing is so over. Just ask Acid PopTart. She’s Gothic Beauty’s star fashion writer, and she has spent the last couple of years chronicling the rise of Electric Goth -- the new style that is “bringing color to a world in black.” Goth designers Feisty Diva and Nyla are creating goth outfits in the full spectrum of neon-bright colors, ranging from Electric Kool-Aid Purple to Attic Insulation Pink.
By the way, the No. 1 city for Goths is Los Angeles, despite the ever-present danger that the SoCal sunshine can turn a goth’s perfect pallor into a hideously glowing tan.
