A common misconception, someone wearing black nail-polish or heavy black eyeliner or someone who prefers black dress is tagged as “Gothic”. And a more drastic misconception is that of tagging Gothic fashion as Satanic. What lead me to write all these? Ok, let me move two steps back.
Raheleh, a quiet shy girl with nicest of the etiquettes and the warmest of hearts who prefers wearing black dress. And I felt so sorry for her when she is “tagged” as Satanist by some of our classmates. But where did the trend of mingling Gothic and Satanic started? And why do people do so? And so I thought of sharing whatever of the little bit I know about Gothic fashion.
Its true that Gothic is stereotyped as ‘dark’. That is because the Goth fashion culture believes in freedom of expression and dares to deviate from the mainstream style statement challenging taboos of all kind. Black with other bold colors like dark red is preferred by people of Gothic subculture. So the main style statement of the Gothic fashion includes dark fingernails, black dyed hair, dark eyeliner and black clothes.
But why people confuse Satanic and Gothic? May be for the mere fact of “black”. Black has always been associated with mourning, with Satan by some. It’s a different fact that the Goths adopted Arianism, a different form of Christianity from the main stream Catholic and Baptist thing. But yet they are Christians and not Satanists.
So please, please, please mark a wide barrier between the two. Because Gothic traditional fashion now belongs to the main stream fashion statement but Satanists are yet to be accepted. And Gothics can be summed up as a sub-group of Christianity itself.
