In looking for the origins of the Goth Girl, one thing you might do is to go looking for the term. That's what I did. I searched for "goth girl" in newspapers online. The first occurrence of "goth girl" that I found is in a review of a performance by the British band The Wonder Stuff, written by Andy Lane and published in the Tamworth Herald (England) on February 11, 1988. I suspect the term was in use well before then. It usually takes awhile before people in a larger or wider culture notice the things that develop in subcultures. (When other people notice is usually when a thing gets ruined, at least in the minds of the people who are already in that subculture.) I also found a reference in 1989 to All About Eve, a "sub-goth girl band," performing in Manchester, England. So it looks like "goth girl" was a British thing first, and that fits with the idea that the Goth Girl look started with Siouxsie Sioux and other British musicians, singers, and fans. I wrote earlier this summer about Manchester and some of its musicians. Maybe they can be proud to have had the first Goth types.
According to my search results, the term "goth girl" or "Goth girl" was used a few times every year during the 1990s. It got a lot more attention in regards to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television show Straight Up and its character Lily, played by Sarah Polley. In an article about the show, reviewer Bonnie Malleck explained that a "goth" girl is "sort of a teenage version of spook show host Elvira." (Boldface added.) That fits with the idea that the Goth Girl is descended from the Elvira-Vampira-Morticia look of the 1930s through the mid 1980s. Ms. Malleck's article was in the Waterloo Region Record, Ontario, Canada, on March 30, 1996. The fact that she had to explain what a Goth Girl is means that the type and the look were still not well known by that name.
Early on, meaning in the 1980s and '90s, the term "goth" girl or "goth girl" appeared in quotation marks. By about 1997, the quotation marks had begun disappearing, signifying, I think, that the term Goth girl had become one that people were supposed to know or be familiar with already. Occurrences of Goth girl picked up after that until there were hundreds every year in the early 2000s. The peak year according to what I found was in 2007, when Goth girl was in newspapers 600 times.
I found an online article dated October 29, 2025, entitled "Goth-Girl Style Owes Everything To Winona Ryder." The blurb below the title reads: "From '90s muse to Tim Burton goth, Winona Ryder's legacy of red-carpet looks proves that goth-girl leanings will never go out of style." (Boldface added.) The article is on the website British Vogue. The reference is to Winona Ryder in the film Beetlejuice, released in 1988. It looks like we can still date the development of the Goth Girl look to the late 1980s.
A related look is the emo girl look. Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club (1985) is kind of an emo girl. Goth Girls and emo girls, or Emo Girls, include the girl from The Ring (2002); the character Abby Sciuto, played by Pauly Perrette in NCIS (2003 and after); the girl from The Incredibles (2004); Raven from Teen Titans Go! (2013 and after); and of course Wednesday Addams in various movies and TV shows. Those dates point to a peak year or years during the early 2000s, or around the same time that zombies (another Gothic type) were so wildly popular and started eating the brains of consumers. It looks like the same thing happened with Goth Girls and Emo Girls as what happened with Gothic Romances and stories in the 1960s: a thing starts out slow and small, it picks up speed, and then it becomes very popular and commodified, or commodified and very popular, before reaching a peak and then fading away. There is always the next big thing to take the place of the last big thing. There are still Goth Girls, but has the type become just a stereotype? Is there any room left in our culture for a new or interesting Goth Girl?
Now for some cuttings and scrapings:
Other possible influences on the Goth look: Vampires from literature and film, including Gloria Holden as the title role in Dracula's Daughter (1936); Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz (1939); Gale Sondergaard in The Blue Bird (1940); Judith Anderson in Rebecca (1940); the Nazi SS; 1950s and '60s motorcycle gangs and motorcycle movies; and plenty of musicians from the 1970s and '80s, including Alice Cooper, the Ramones, KISS, Joan Jett, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde (another September birthday), . . .
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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