(To our Tumblr followers: we read you on the feed side b/c Cindy really loathes using the Tumblr interface for reading posts.)
We were all young and poor: If your clothes were all black, everything matched and was vaguely elegant (especially if you squinted). Entropy was a thrifty, built-in style; if your tights ripped into cobwebs, that, too, was a look.
[…]
Looking back at my own experience, it seems that black clothes were a response to certain catastrophic influences that came up with terrible regularity. We had all lost, or were in the process of losing, friends to AIDS, addictions and accidents. There were always disappointments in romance, and no surplus of mental health or functional families. Boots, black and leather provided a certain group with a certain emotional exoskeleton, a blustering attempt to express an edgy, careless willingness to hurl ourselves into oblivion. But the writing on the collective black flag, for all our reckless posturing, may have been best articulated as: “Ow, I’m hypersensitive. Please don’t hurt me again.”
You Just Can’t Kill It - NYTimes.com
I wanted this article to do more, Cintra. I feel like you had a lot to say about your own experience with goth fashion and posturing — which is good, but you couldn’t really tie it all together in the end, which is less good. Perhaps I’m just overly critical because I am editing a giant book right now — but I feel like perhaps you could have explored the goth/emo schism a little more clearly? Pulled the high fashion angle in a little more tightly in juxtaposition to the kids from the internet? Rounded it all up with your personal anecdotes? Like I said, you almost got there, but it needed … something to really make it sing.