What Goes With Black

'It just seems like play-acting', said my mother about the Goths. And of course it is. My couple of days in Whitby made me reflect on whether, and how far, grown-up people should indulge in such antics. Especially very grown-up people.

Of course I’m never satisfied. I’d ended up, accidentally you understand, trailing one particular Goth girl all the way from the Tube to Ruswarp station where she went on to the town itself. Unfeasibly tall, skinny twenty-or-so thing in a long plum brocade coat, frilly jabot and enormous boots, hair shaven into a wonderful pattern like one of Fuseli’s fantasy women. Now she looked the part. But once she gathered a gang of like-aged friends and they sat at the back of the train incessantly chattering about nothing other than computer games and how pissed they got the last time they went to Whitby, I was converted into the mindset of a Goth Daily Telegraph leader.

Then, walking round the town on Thursday, the opposite. Whenever I saw someone who was younger than 50 who didn’t walk with a limp because they’d done a knee in I doubted the evidence of my senses. This is Whitby, for heaven’s sake, the town which for a week or so each year has a higher proportion of top hats and crinolines than anywhere else on earth: it ought to be glamorous. It ought not to make me weep at the sight of yet another pot-bellied fossil squeezed into a brocade coat. It ought not to make me feel slightly ashamed at owning a Darkangel frock-coat myself. It ought not to make me start thinking that the ordinary residents and day-trippers look better than the Goths do. Thank God for the evening concert where some youngsters restored my faith. Leave it to them, I wanted to say, leave it to them, as I sat in my very sober black three-piece suit and tie. There’s a reason why chaps (and even Chaps) developed traditional male dress: it was to stop aging gentlemen looking preposterous. The girls don’t look quite as nuts, but even so...

On the way home I was reading a book on cinematiste terrible Ken Russell. 'Russell', fumed one exasperated critic, 'trivialises and debases his source material, and then re-inflates it to monstrous proportions'. Well, there’s the Gothic enterprise in a nutshell which explains why so many of us even have an uneasy relationship with it.

As a friend commented, with the best will in the world there are visitors to Whitby Gothic who are wearing their Gothic finery as costume, and for most Goths the c-word is anathema. There’s a difference between costume and clothing, the difference between adopting something essentially outside you and expressing something essentially from inside. The one can perhaps be a stage leading to the other, because in some ways we are, or become, what we wear, but they’re not the same, and the waters are muddied because anyone with enough money can go to a Goth retailer and buy dramatic-looking gear without really considering how daft it looks on them. We lose the notion of materialising the drama and beauty of the world (which is what Goth does) while maintaining a sense of individual style.

And then there’s the question of what you aspire to. Why does Steampunk style have such appeal for gentlemen (and some ladies)? Because the values it embodies – the values of gentility and adventure – are achievable (and worthwhile) no matter how old or young, portly or svelte you happen to be. Expressing your inner Victorian engineer or explorer is realistic. But your inner pirate, vampire, Byronic aristocrat or highwayman had better stay inside if you look more like you’d have a coronary chasing after your victim.

This isn’t to be snotty: my friends recalled meeting a bearded man on a Whitby street, a couple of years ago, wearing a huge white wedding dress because it was the only place and occasion he could wear it outside and still be accepted. There’s something rather moving about that, notwithstanding the dreadful offence against aesthetics, and I suspect many Whitby-goers are isolated folk with no other outlet for their inner sense of who they are. But perhaps there’s a need for some friendly advice here. It doesn’t suit you, sir, it really doesn’t.