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Article: Darkness at noon
- Article from:
- New Statesman
- Article date:
- December 8, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright New Statesman Ltd. Dec 8, 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Darkness at noon
I met a knot of Goths at night, posing through Smithfield Market on the Day of the Dead, youngsters whose artifice and formality was too much for this world: all dressed up and nowhere grave enough to go. Few crypts could have lived up to their aspirations. No surprise that Gothicism tempts art-school students. Valerie Steele, in her essay on the outfitting side of Gothic: Dark Glamour (Yale University Press, £19.99), ls at her most persuasive when she connects the Goth culture of the past 30 years with Baudelaire, "the black prince of elegance" of the 1840s, a self-made outsider - dandy, vampire, aristocrat who ticks all the right wrongboxes.
Steele distinguishes and ...