Goth is a music-based subculture that emerged from nightclubs such as the F Club and Batcave in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s, as well as gothic rock, a genre that evolved from British post-punk. The goth subculture is mainly centered around fashion, music festivals, clubs, and organized meetings.

Styles of dress within the subculture draw on glam rock, punk, new wave, new romantics and from the fashion of earlier periods such as the Victorian, Edwardian, and Belle Époque eras. The style most often includes dark (usually solid black) attire, dark makeup, and black hair. The subculture also drew inspiration from literary and cinematic gothic traditions, including German Expressionism and classic horror films (from Universal Monsters to Hammer horror), with a flair for theatricality and camp.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the goth subculture entered mainstream awareness, with its visual style and fashion influencing various aesthetic variants such as cybergoth and mall goth, while facing public moral panic, with media often linking it to deviance and self-harm.^[1] The subculture further developed on early social networking sites such as MySpace^[2] and Pure Volume.^[3] During the 2010s and 2020s, goth fashion internet aesthetics such as Health Goth and Whimsigoth emerged.