reviewed by Johan
Gothic culture tirelessly marches on towards greater popularity despite being virtually a religious subculture subject to persecution in America. But when any great designer needs an edge, it's often the first place they will reach for ideas. And Gothic culture now has gone global, with huge followings in Japan, Europe, Mexico and central and south America, each region contributing equally fantastic twists, and with a dedicated network of supporters penetrating every country on Earth.
Enter Gothic Beauty magazine.Daring to define the enigmatic Gothic culture for nearly a decade. Unafraid to embrace the controversial, but always finding a route to the fantastic, seductive and beautiful in a way which turns the cynical American status quo on its head to create a darkly beautiful sensibility, offering alternatives spanning the range of our own culture like a parallel universe made up of darker dreams with better endings.
Gothic Beauty, at once loved by people on the Gothic fringes and neglected by counterculture snobs, will be the first established example anyone will go looking for to defend Gothic culture from silly misinterpretations. (Continued...)
Unconcerned with detractors, and with a hearty soul of decadence fiercely independent Gothic Beauty lays out a tasteful silk lined coffin full of alternative sensibilities, reserved enough for the widest audience and the youth that will be tomorrow's edgy rockers and fashionistas, but substantial enough in its own right to stimulate the core connoisseurs and offer an audience for their many fascinating endeavors.
Inside each issue you will find a witches' cauldron of seductively nihilistic aesthetics, shamelessly delicious pop, and creative geniuses. Readers will find something to simultaneously please purveyors of the eclectic, and irritate the doubters. The broad and fantastic Gothic subculture comfortably embraces and combines a fantastic range of fashions, lifestyles and ideas --- from a new twist on Victorianism, complete with outlandish ballroom hoop skirts and corsetry, the baroque, Edward Gorey, the nostalgia of vampires, and the horror kitsch of Ed Wood and Vampira, to the club scene, the full range of darkwave music, onto the piercings, fetishes, tattoos and grinding beats of the industrial underground, all of which form the many surprising layers between the covers of a humble issue of Gothic Beauty in your hands. Enjoy. --Johan
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