Goth Kit (IP)

At seventeen, I was a goth. A serious goth. I lived in skin-tight black drainpipes, slippery viscose shirts, eyeliner so sharp it could cut glass, and winklepickers that doubled as weapons. My friends and I, all equally pale and brooding, would skulk around like bats in a cave, smoking cigarettes, watching horror movies, and listening to Bauhaus on repeat. We roamed the night, dropping LSD and pondering the ecstasy of death, while everyone else at sixth form worried about things like “A-levels” and “prom.”

I had graduated rapidly from Billy Idol and The Lost Boys to the grimy underworld of London’s Slimelight club, where we danced in dark caged corners to The Sisters of Mercy. Regular people? They went to The Limelight to sway to Take That. We pitied them deeply.

One of my prized possessions was a pair of “bondage-style” trousers from Kensington Market, the sacred temple of alternative fashion. These trousers were masterpieces of impracticality, crisscrossed with black strings running up the sides. They didn’t hold anything in place or serve any actual function—they were just there. And I thought they were the height of gothic sophistication.

Picture me: moody, intense, gazing into the middle distance as though contemplating eternity. I wore those trousers to school one day, my winklepickers clicking purposefully on the linoleum floor, certain I exuded mystery and danger. But fate, ever the cruel comedian, had other plans.

In the common room, surrounded by the unwashed masses of sixth form, someone spotted the crisscrossed strings on my trousers and couldn’t resist temptation. With one swift YANK, the entire contraption unravelled. The strings zipped up the sides of my legs like cartoon window blinds, and the trousers—my once-glorious trousers—bunched up around my thighs in a bizarre ruffled mess.

Suddenly, there they were: my skinny, pale calves and knobbly knees, gleaming like two awkward ghosts under the fluorescent lights. The room fell silent for the briefest moment, like the pause before a bomb explodes. And then it came—the laughter.

It was the kind of laugh that echoes in your nightmares, a wave of hysterical joy at my expense. My attempts to reclaim my dark, brooding mystique were futile. I stood there, caught between yanking the trousers back down or simply melting into the floor. My winklepickers, which I’d always thought looked edgy, now just looked ridiculous beneath my exposed shins.

In that moment, my carefully cultivated gothic gravitas crumbled faster than the eyeliner running down my cheeks at Slimelight. The ecstasy of death didn’t feel so appealing anymore—at least not compared to the embarrassment of being a goth with his trousers in a heap around his thighs.