What You See First

Set the two wardrobes side by side and most items appear on one only.

Goth. Velvet, lace, fishnet, a corset worn over the shirt. Skirts to the floor, usually over a petticoat, and coats cut to the calf or past it. Boots on a two-inch platform, buckle up the shaft, with a resale market for the brands that folded. Silver in Victorian shapes, gold almost never. Crosses, keys, coffin outlines. A choker, velvet or leather.

Emo. Skinny jeans, black or dark indigo. A band shirt, bought a size down. Under it a striped long sleeve, black with red or white. Then a hoodie over the top, worn open, black or grey. Belts studded and slung low, sometimes two at once. Wristbands up the forearm. Converse or Vans, worn in. Plaid turns up as a skirt or knotted at the waist.

The band shirt is the one item both lists share, in the same cut, from the same suppliers, bought from the same handful of printers.

Of everything on those two lists, the leg is what still works at thirty metres in a dark venue. Goth adds volume below the waist and even the fitted versions put the weight somewhere else: a corset over leggings gets platform boots underneath, or a coat to the calf on top. Emo takes the volume out, holds one width from hip to ankle, and finishes at the ankle bone with the shoe visible. Goth hems cover the shoe and, on a full-length skirt, the floor as well.

Colour splits as cleanly. A goth outfit stays black because colour would interrupt what the black is doing. Velvet, lace, leather, mesh and satin all take light differently, so an all-black outfit still has depth in it. Emo uses black as a background and puts a printed graphic, a plaid or a stripe against it.

The emo fringe is the detail that survived into general use, worn by people who never bought a record. Hair straightened flat, parted low on one side, swept across at an angle steep enough to cover one eye. The job was concealment. The music it belongs to was confessional, sung about one person to a room. The fringe covers the eye a listener would otherwise meet.

Goth hair moves the other way, off the face. Worn back or up, symmetrical, with the face left as a made surface underneath it.

The mouth is the cleanest single tell after the trouser. Dark lipstick puts a face on the goth side of the line unless the wearer is in a Black Parade jacket.

What to Do When the Signs Conflict

None of the above settles this one. Black skinny jeans, a band shirt, a side fringe, platform boots.

Weigh the items by how hard each one is to end up with by accident. A studded belt and a band shirt have been available in any American mall since Hot Topic stocked them. Platform boots, a corset, a floor-length skirt and Victorian silver need a specialist shop, a budget and a decision made in advance.

So the rare items outrank the common ones. The trouser loses its first place the moment anything rarer is in the frame. Platform boots and dark lipstick with a band shirt reads goth, skinny jeans notwithstanding. Skinny jeans and Converse with a black lace top reads emo. Whichever item took effort points to where the wearer was headed.

Black or oxblood lipstick has to be bought, applied and reapplied through an evening. Eyeliner survives a night out on its own.

Both scenes wear it, along with most of the population under forty.

Emo goth turns up as a self-description: emo's emotional register with goth's romantic and dramatic side, skinny jeans under a Victorian blouse, a wardrobe that spans My Chemical Romance and Siouxsie and the Banshees. An outfit can carry a skinny jean, a band shirt and a side fringe against a corset, a coat to the calf and a dark mouth. People have described themselves that way since about 2010, mostly online, and mostly without waiting for anyone to accept it.

A Goth Outfit and an Emo Outfit, Item by Item

The Batcave, London, 1982 to 1985. No London shop stocked this. The room made it, in an account Dazed later collected from the people who were there. Women's tights used as sleeves. Vintage men's suits pulled apart and repainted. African jewellery. Anything findable got altered.

On Siouxsie Sioux: geometric brows swept into the corner of the eye, Egyptian eyeliner, a sharply painted mouth, jewelled gloves, fetish pieces worn as outerwear. Robert Smith settled his look in exactly these years. Pale complexion, red lipstick smeared across the mouth, black eyeliner, backcombed hair left wiry, black throughout.

Men and women in that room wore makeup by different rules. Nik Fiend of Alien Sex Fiend went out in full ghoul facepaint. Each version came out of somebody's own hands.

My Chemical Romance, The Black Parade, 2006. A military parade jacket in black with silver braid, rows of buttons, epaulettes, cut close to the body. Black trousers, narrow. Combat boots. Gerard Way cropped his hair short and bleached it white, as a way into the character he was singing. The makeup ran to heavy black smoke around the eye and pale foundation, with a smudged red or black mouth on some days.

The single went up on MySpace on 2 September 2006 and out as a record ten days later. Kerrang described the look as Sgt Pepper by way of Hot Topic. The band was reaching for a 1967 concept record and the clothes came off a 2006 shop rail.

Two outfits, twenty-four years apart. The first was assembled from items no shop stocked. The second was designed for a video, then stocked in Hot Topic's six hundred stores.

The Black Parade makeup is pale foundation and a dark mouth, which is the goth combination and not the emo one. The biggest emo band of the third wave spent an album cycle in goth makeup.

Both Came Out of Punk

Punk produced both. Each was pushing away from a different part of it.

Goth broke from punk's velocity. Post-punk slowed the tempo, put reverb on the guitar and dropped the bass into the foreground, and the wardrobe followed it into Victorian and Edwardian territory. Mourning dress, funeral silhouettes, a nineteenth century that punk had no use for. Where punk had cut and ripped, this lot sewed, laced and boned.

Emo pushed away from punk's violence. That push is unusually well documented. The people leaving were the same people who had built the thing they were leaving. The DC hardcore scene of the early 1980s had become physically dangerous at shows. The bands that broke from it turned the lyrics inward, towards the individual, while keeping the clothes the scene already wore. Goth went looking for a period to borrow from and settled on the 1880s. On the emo side the t-shirt stayed, and only the printing on it changed, from Minor Threat to Taking Back Sunday over about twenty years.

Neither Scene Chose Its Own Name

Neither subculture named itself. Both labels came from outside, and the bands at the centre were uncomfortable with them. Goth arrived through the British music press in the early 1980s, applied to bands that had not asked for it. Bauhaus released Bela Lugosi's Dead in 1979, a nine-minute single about a dead horror actor. It gets called the first gothic rock record retrospectively. Nobody called it that in 1979.

Emo's version is sharper. Guy Picciotto, later of Fugazi, formed Rites of Spring in Washington DC in late 1983. The band played fewer than twenty shows in its entire existence, nearly all of them in DC, and it now sits at the head of the first wave, filed there afterwards rather than at the time. It rejected the term.

Picciotto and drummer Brendan Canty went on to form Fugazi, on the same label.

What Each One Sounds Like

Both wardrobes were built to match a sound.

Goth's founding records are atmospheric. Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division. Deep bass in the foreground, reverb on everything, vocals delivered as performance. Constructed, theatrical, made to be seen from a distance under a light.

Emo started from confession. Rites of Spring and Embrace out of DC, then Jawbreaker and Sunny Day Real Estate in the nineties, then Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional going platinum in the early 2000s, then My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy. Loud-quiet dynamics, lyrics addressed to one person. Close to the body, unremarkable from a distance, legible once the shirt is readable.

For placing an unfamiliar band, singing aimed at a room sits closer to goth and singing aimed at one person sits nearer emo. The shortcut fails on plenty of records.

Clubs and Festivals Against Tours and Websites

Goth's institutions have addresses. The Batcave opened on 21 July 1982 at 69 Dean Street in Soho, one night a week, in a room above the Gargoyle Club. Olli Wisdom of Specimen ran it with Jon Klein as art director. Robert Smith, Nick Cave, Siouxsie Sioux and Marc Almond turned up. The original room lasted five months. The club closed in 1985 and left a word behind: batcaver came from that address.

Everything since has kept the same shape. Slimelight opened at Electrowerkz in Islington in 1987 and ran every Saturday until March 2020. It runs monthly now, in the same building, four decades on. Wave-Gotik-Treffen has run in Leipzig every year since 1992, four days at Whitsuntide, a hundred and fifty bands, and an attendance around twenty thousand. Whitby Goth Weekend began in 1994 when Jo Hampshire invited around forty of her pen-pals to a pub. It now runs twice a year with over a hundred stalls.

Emo's equivalents moved. Warped Tour moved through a city and left. MySpace hosted the scene and is still there, minus the scene. Hot Topic had those six hundred stores and no membership. None of it had an address to go back to. The reference point for goth is still a room that ran for five months in 1982.

Goth Lasts Decades, Emo Lasted a Few Years

Goth has vocabulary for its own age structure. Elder goth is a term of respect. Baby bat is the term for a newcomer.

Post a flyer for a festival from 1984 and the comments fill with people who were there, still going to gigs forty years later. A collection of scholarly essays on the subculture exists to explain that continuity. Whitby is partly populated by goths who moved to the town. The subculture treats staying as the normal outcome.

Emo gets discussed, by its own participants included, as something with an end date. The wardrobe belongs to a stretch of school years, and the people who wore it in 2006 describe it in the past tense.

A subculture that lasts three years can be sold as a set of clothes. One you stay in for forty needs somewhere that opens again next week, which is what Slimelight and Whitby and Leipzig have been doing since 1987, 1994 and 1992.

Emo Has Had Four Waves

Emo runs in waves.

First wave, 1980s. Washington DC. Rites of Spring, Embrace, Beefeater, Dag Nasty, Moss Icon, most of them on Dischord, the label Ian MacKaye ran with Jeff Nelson. MacKaye called emocore, in his own words, "the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life".

Second wave, 1990s. The centre moved to the Midwest. Cap'n Jazz formed in Buffalo Grove, Illinois in 1989 and broke up in 1995 after one album. American Football out of Urbana, Braid out of Illinois, The Get Up Kids out of Kansas City. Mineral came from Austin and got filed as Midwest emo anyway. Twinkling guitars, odd time signatures, house shows in college towns. Sunny Day Real Estate came out of Seattle and was the geographic exception.

Third wave, 2000s. Thursday's Full Collapse in 2001, then Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Panic at the Disco. MTV, Warped Tour, Bamboozle, MySpace, LiveJournal, Buzznet.

Fourth wave, late 2000s to mid 2010s. Modern Baseball and Algernon Cadwallader in Philadelphia, Tigers Jaw in Scranton, The Hotelier in Worcester, Joyce Manor in Torrance, California. Scattered geographically, reaching back past the third wave to the second.

The black hair, the eyeliner and the skinny jeans belong to the third wave. First and second wave emo dressed in what the scene called geek chic: glasses, cardigans, clean lines, deliberately unremarkable. The critic Andy Greenwald called it "boy-driven, glasses-wearing, overly sensitive, overly brainy" college music.

Goth's wardrobe has run continuously since 1979. Set against that, the emo one everybody pictures covers about seven years. The usual comparison sets all of goth beside one eighth of emo. The eighth it picks is the part a shop was selling. The other three waves went largely unphotographed, played to rooms of a hundred people.

Scene Is Neither Goth Nor Emo

Scene arrived around 2008 and peaked fast. Hair teased high at the crown and straightened flat below, streaked in bright dye. Neon, not black. Slogan shirts, gauges in the ears, sunglasses indoors, hair spray in quantity. Emo names a genre of music with a forty-year discography. Scene named a way of looking, tied to no sound in particular.

Scene borrowed the emo fringe and inverted the rest. The two overlapped on MySpace for about three years. In 2019 a botched server migration wiped everything uploaded to MySpace between 2003 and 2015, around fifty million songs, so most of the evidence is gone anyway.

Goth Gatekeeps, Emo Was Sold

Who gets to say you are not goth? In that scene, somebody does. Paul Hodkinson's ethnography of the scene ran to seventy-two interviews and a Whitby questionnaire returned by over a hundred people. It sets out four things that hold the subculture together. Identity, commitment, consistent distinctiveness, autonomy. Liking the clothes covers one of those. Failing the rest has its own word. Mall goth entered use in the late 1990s as a pejorative, aimed at people who dressed goth without listening to goth. It functions the way poseur does.

Retail handled emo membership. Hot Topic opened in a California mall in 1989. Its 2007 annual report put licensed band t-shirts at around forty per cent of revenue. The entire emo wardrobe hung on a rack in all six hundred of them, priced for a teenager. The till asked nothing about what you listened to.

Goth has a slur for people who bought the look without the music. On the other side a chain sold that look to anyone who walked in.

A subculture that polices entry needs premises to do the policing in. Clubs, a night that recurs, a door. That apparatus keeps running whether or not a shop is currently stocking the clothes. Hodkinson's argument turns on exactly this. Commerce did not dissolve the goth scene. The scene had its own criteria running alongside the shopping.

Emo built its own apparatus and then stopped using it. Dischord has run since 1980 and still does. The second wave played house shows in college towns. Both of those are exactly the sort of thing that keeps a subculture alive without a shop.

What the third wave did was leave that behind. Warped Tour came through once a summer. MySpace was a website. A company answerable to a share price handled the wardrobe. When that company changed its stock in 2006, the people who had bought in through the shop had nothing to fall back on. The Dischord network was still there. It had nothing to do with them.

The clothes give you a probability either way. Goth is the side that will tell you when you guessed wrong.

The confusion started in one shop. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hot Topic stocked Tripp trousers, spiked chokers, fishnet and band shirts. The customers buying them were listening to nu metal and industrial. The Batcave had nothing to do with any of it, which is how a word for people who dressed goth without the music came into use.

For that decade the two wardrobes shared a shopfloor. A teenager could buy a studded choker and a My Chemical Romance shirt in one transaction, both shelved under the same heading, and from outside either scene it looked like one dark-clothed group.

Around 2006 the store moved its stock towards emo and dropped goth. Twenty years on, the confusion has outlived the decision. Hot Topic still trades. Goth stopped being what the shopfloor was built around.

Where Both Stand in 2026

The trad goth wardrobe of 1985 is legible today and the clubs still run. The scene absorbed its offshoots without losing the centre: deathrock, cybergoth, romantic goth, nu goth, pastel goth. A goth in 2026 can dress the way a goth dressed at the Batcave and read as current within the scene.

Emo came back as a revival, which is a different thing from continuity: the mid-2000s wardrobe is now a period costume, the people wearing it know that, and when My Chemical Romance reunited the audience dressed for 2005 on purpose. The skinny jean has since stopped being the default trouser, stranding the rest of the outfit in a decade nobody dresses from.

Common Questions