Eli5: How did the term “Goth” go from Germanic tribes destroying Rome, to the music and fashion we know today?
In: 7280
To add another step, there was a Gothic Revival around the early 19th century, largely as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, mass production, conformity and the “dark satanic mills”. There was great interest in the medieval or native pre-industrial styles across art, architecture, music and literature.
It took a while before 19th c. gothic revival architecture actually started to look anything like actual gothic architecture, interestingly, because almost everything had been forgotten and needed to be relearned. Early Victorian Gothic can look very cack-handed.
In literature, you had the great Romantic and Gothic writers like Wordsworth, the Bronte sisters, Mrs and Mr Shelly, and on into people like Stoker and “Dracula”. They all loved individualism, intense emotion, moody looking into middle distance, and a flamboyant disregard for one’s continuing existence.
The term moved over into music from there, as other posts have said.
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