Dress
Rachel Jones
1994
This dress was designed and made by Rachel Black in 1994 and worn by her to Brisbane’s annual gothic gathering the Carpathian Magistratus Vampyre Ball. The gothic subculture is one of the most popular, diverse and enduring of Australian subcultures. Emerging in the early 1980s they inherited elements from the theatrical sexually ambiguous New Romantics and mixed it with the creative anarchy and bleak alienation of punk. Large groups of goths exist in most Australian capital cities and many relatively isolated country towns include a handful of goths.
Rachel Black’s dress illustrates the way Australian youth have used alternative forms of dress, body decoration and modification to express individual and collective identities, aesthetic codes, values, beliefs and cultural experiences different to those of the dominant culture. Most of the subcultural expressions including the gothic subculture have been imported from Great Britain or the United States via migration and popular culture, developing their own identity within Australia.
The gothic subcultures fascination with death and decay and its mysterious, melancholy and romantic outlook is well illustrated in Rachel Black’s collection of clothing and magazines. Romantic, floor length, black velvet, lace trimmed dresses were a favourite goth style of the 1980s and early 1990s inspired by gothic literature, horror films, American television series ‘The Addams Family’ and historical dress styles. The theatrical dressed up styles offered freedom from the limitations of the trend focussed and dressed down clothing worn by most young Australian men and women. Its subcultural and sexual inclusivity and visually creative and experimental mode has given the gothic subculture wide appeal and longevity.
Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences
