I

 
One manifestation of life in a late capitalist society is a penchant for escapism through performance, manifested through codified dress.
 
At least, that’s the conclusion I am drawing while stuck behind a booth at the Tampa Bay Renaissance Festival. Outfitted in a piss-poor interpretation of a medieval wench outfit, I have been hired to offer jaded children attendees a “thrill-ride” in a wooden box. It is hoisted by manually-operated rope pulleys, and very unlikely to ever have been inspected by experts in safety engineering.
 
The wench outfit is my own creation. Too broke to buy a faux-noble corset—and with the idea that resourcefulness is the daughter of penury—I instead combined a black broom skirt from the clearance section at the local Stein Mart with a black cotton voile peasant top, itself found in the sale bin of the wench-outfitting booth next door. My look has been financed through a previous fair gig selling bongs for my friend’s stepfather.
 
I look ridiculous; a Vietnamese goth Vermeer milkmaid. Thankfully, I’m not alone.

Amidst little girls in princess outfits, girthy retired motorcycle gang members munching on turkey legs, and suspicious-looking carnies in tights, a group of wraithlike creatures skulk about in tattered fishnets and crushed velvet tops. This adolescent tribe is weighed down by twenty pounds apiece of cheap silver jewelry and black eyeliner, likely shoplifted from Wet Seal and Walgreens. Hired by Renaissance Festival promoters ostensibly as neighborhood peasants, they have taken full advantage of this opportunity to flood its grounds with their teen witch cohorts. I’m no medieval historian, but I don’t think the peasants back then wore black nail polish—or, for that matter, dog collars.
 
Heading this motley crew are a few old friends I recognize from middle school. These conspirators had spent days with me engaging in bus brawls, leafing through beginner astrology guides in the cafeteria, and pasting band names and photos on our lunch boxes. Greeting each other, we commiserate over the pains of maintaining subcultural orthodoxy at an open-air festival in 95-degree heat.
 

II

 
Goth abounds, and even thrives, in places where there is a 10:1 sunlight ratio. The hot-weather goth phenomenon in America is well-documented. Featured on blogs and in documentaries, goth style even provides inspiration for Disneyland events and cruises.
 
A cursory look of geographical concentrations of Hot Topic stores (a retail mecca for the fledgling Goth) finds that California, Texas, and Florida possess the greatest number of outlets. Adjusted for population size, Florida possesses the most Hot Topics per capita amongst the five most populous states, followed by Texas and California.'1' If one can believe that there is a correlation between the presence of a goth population and demand for $20 vinyl pants, then one may infer there must be a specific draw to the dark side amongst the sunlit environs of the United States.

How has this come to pass, and what would explain this phenomenon? I blame it all on middle school in the suburban prairies of Florida, and the vicissitudes of first-world adolescence, when confused kids have too much time and money on their hands as they start to make inroads on defining their physical and emotional identity. This process is primarily expressed through listening to (mostly) terrible music and experimenting with (mostly) terrible clothes, bought or stolen from the closest mall. A near-instant group and individual identity coalesces, made most apparent via sartorial practice.

This subcultural identification, no matter how clichéd and commercially co-opted, is appealing as a readily recognizable means of questioning prevailing community norms. It also pushes all the predictable buttons a teenager would want to push. The goth subculture, particularly, asserts the existence of an alternate plane of reality outside constraints of environment, delineated gender norms, the time-space continuum, acceptable social emotional displays and conventional theories of evolution. The escapism associated with goth culture encourages untrammeled displays of imaginative excess. Goth provides a nascent introduction to the basics of creating cultural paradigm shifts, mostly through its re-appropriation and celebration of marginalized and antiquated genres of literature, music and religion. Goth, and its sub-cultural brethren, provides ready-made visual languages attractive to those trying to sort out the ins and outs of authentic self-expression. '2'
 
These affectations are particularly potent when performed in a completely incongruous environment. That might explain the enduring popularity of goth in places like Florida, the land of endless sunshine, Jimmy Buffett and vaguely threatening private communities built by Disney. This is part of what makes blogs like Goths in Hot Weather—or Goth Cruise, a documentary following a group of goths “taking part in the absolute antithesis of goth-a cruise in the blazing sunshine”—so truly hilarious, but, at the same time, so visually effective and intriguing to the uninitiated.

There is something to be said about the visual power of a person in a black leather trenchcoat and knee-high platform boots, standing around on a Gulf Coast beach, or taking your tickets at a mermaid theme park. It is the major appeal of goth in a subtropical locale—stagy and theatrical sartorial and cultural modalities, no matter how clichéd and trite in their performance, are taken to new heights when placed in juxtaposition to turquoise beaches and blazingly hot, verdant landscapes.
 

III

 
The majority of my 12-year-old Floridian female peers wanted to establish themselves as refined in taste and upbringing, and so wore multi-colored, cuffed Bongo jorts that stopped at the upper thigh, chintzy low-cut pastel tank tops, and chunky platform sneakers that some unfortunate designer thought would be an appropriate mix between form and function.

I, on the other hand, chose to dress in a manner partly inspired by c. 1992 Courtney Love, partly by Marilyn Manson (fellow Floridian), all filtered through the lens of a 12-year-old who spent too much time at the library, wasn’t allowed to watch TV or buy music albums and really only knew about these stars from the covers of US Weekly and borrowed cassette tapes. An odd child, with a hyperactive imagination and sense of the macabre developed from years of listening to war stories told at bedtime—and an inability to assimilate in a racially homogenous community—goth was a completely logical fit to my nascent interests and yearnings. The performative aspects certainly were attractive—if you couldn’t fit in, and you weren’t happy about it, why not invert the paradigm and embrace that in the most flamboyant way possible as a means of self-empowerment?
 
Besides, dressing like a zombie who asserts paranormal sway is fun at any age.
 
My fellow teen goths were facilitated by more relaxed parenting standards, access to capital and excess time to kill. After all, it takes cash and hours to spend loitering at the mall in order to be a serious subcultural practitioner. American teen subcultures are primarily a function of middle-class suburbs because they require acquisition and rigorous curation. Seeing the right concerts, researching the right bands and getting the exact music to distinguish one from mere “poser” was by no means an easy endeavor in the 14.4k-modem internet days.

My parents didn’t pay me for working in their dental lab, where I gave porcelain crowns and bridges a natural touch. So I did what every other burgeoning clotheshorse and good girl teen rebel did in order to procure sartorial consumables: I simply didn’t eat lunch. Squirreling away my meal allowance, I bought off the buy-one-get-one racks at Contempo Casuals (Wet Seal’s long-dead, slightly kookier sister). Packing my backpack before school, I would carefully hide my fishnets and metal chains from my parents in a plastic bag underneath all of my books and homework.
 
I probably could have been a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, had I put the same amount of effort into my chemistry classes as I had put into my clothes.
 

IV

 
In April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—dressed in jeans, t-shirts, baseball caps, and bandoliers—walked into Colorado’s Columbine High School and embarked on a massacre that killed 13 and injured 24, before committing suicide.

At first, the popular media associated Harris and Klebold with Columbine’s local goth contingent due to their tastes in morbid music, movies and video games. In the ensuing weeks and months, authorities, parents and students nationwide started taking a bit more interest at those teenagers who happened to have a predilection for Skinny Puppy and wore black eye makeup. School authorities banned trenchcoats in Florida high schools. Teachers started sending kids home for wearing clothing or accessories that could be deemed potentially antisocial.
 
I was a junior in high school then, fresh out of taking my PSATs. The blame game resulting from this tragedy was stupid to me. A loosely-formed subculture—which, at worst, was responsible for grating music and an avalanche of badly-written poetry—was being made wholly responsible for the actions of two teen psychopaths. By this period I no longer really identified as a goth, but I didn’t like how quick authorities were to incite moral panic and judge character based on vaguely morbid appearance. Dressing up goth was to me merely a means to escape a dreary daily existence, to create visual signifiers that attracted like to like, and to establish alternate micro-realities.

What goth-encoded dress never signified was a call to arms for complete annihilation of the world. Goth kids weren’t much different than the girls dreaming of Carrie Bradshaw and the mythical New York of endless closet space and Louboutins for every day of the year. They just chose a different—yet equally potent—mythology for their inspiration.
 

IV

 
Lately, goth has been making a comeback as a look, if not as a way of life. Kids and their mothers, all of whom have read Twilight a few too many times, dress up like teen wolves or daydream about being rescued by sparkly vampires. The somber, if flamboyant, dress codes of the goth scene have been incorporated into runway looks reflective of ascetic economic and social realities, perhaps out of a desire for a fantasy universe ripe with paranormal activity to take us away from it all.

After all, the plutocrat chic of flat-front chinos, pastel polos and power suits got us into this mess. Prep is not going to cut it for these times. Other subcultural motifs—from the “peace please” hippie look, to the smash-the-system…but-then-what punks—don’t provide the sort of escapism we can gravitate towards when times are tough. Goth, with its stylistic pastiche of times long gone and its rich alternate reality, seems appropriate for an era that feels grey in every respect. If you’re of the constructivist bent, goth also provides an example of what the world can look like if you throw aside physical restraints, dream up your own mythologies and make them a reality—creating a wholly different identity and self in doing so.  
 
I’ve long since stopped reading Anne Rice novels, or buying anything with the word “velvet” in the product description. Few, if any, of my friends from high school or middle school would now actively identify with any subculture. The vestiges of those former identities, however, often still play out in dress, musical and literary tastes, political identifications and social viewpoints. To me, this is manifested in my belief that there is always potential: to create, to grow, to shift paradigms, to mold new realities.
 
Now, when I see suburban high schoolers dressed like wizards and teen vampires make completely jackass remarks, I of course can’t help but laugh at first. But I recognize my younger self in them, and I admire their clumsy efforts to transform themselves and the universe around them in a way that seems more poetic, sympathetic and respectful of the past. In my old age, I’ve laid off the black eyeliner, and moved past my convinced belief in the existence of the undead—but always entertain the possibility of darker possibilities.