Like Stephen King wrote in his 1981 book, Danse Macabre: “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” And in 2026, we’re doing a lot of coping.
“Crisis is no longer a surprise,” Anna adds. “It is, scarily, becoming a normal part of daily life for many people. With 69% of the global population reporting a lack of faith in government leadership, consumers are distancing themselves from mainstream structures. The Gothic aesthetic provides a visual language for deviance and rage, allowing individuals to navigate a sense of powerlessness.”
And the psychology backs this theory up. “We can confront and express our own anger, frustration, trauma, disappointment, and feelings of resentment through dark fashions, themes, and visuals,” says psychologist Dr Candice O’Neil, “free of the risk of disruption to our real-world lives and relationships.”
Counselling Directory member Hannah Jackson-McCamley agrees, telling me: “The term ‘dark coping’ was coined by the Recreational Fear Lab, whose research shows that leaning into horror or Gothic themes is a means of navigating a world that [we] see as scary.”
There’s a lengthy precedent for Gothic popularity that “cluster[s] around periods of rapid change or social fracture,” as Agustina puts it.
She points out how the Victorian Gothic (think Wuthering Heights, Dracula and Edgar Allan Poe) happened during the upheaval that went hand-in-hand with widespread industrialisation, and the Goth subculture of the 1980s/90s emerged under a cloud of Cold War fears and the AIDS epidemic.
“A reprieve from clinical perfection.”
The permacrisis probably isn’t the only thing at play here, either – the Gothenaissance could also be a rebellion against what Anna calls: “the homogenisation of culture.”
She explains: “It’s clear that, more broadly in culture, people are battling sameness fatigue. Previous dominant aesthetics, such as the ‘clean girl’, enforced rigid, exclusionary standards of grooming and consumption (for instance, slicked-back hair, specific neutral palettes, and luxury basics). But the Gothic shift offers a reprieve from this clinical perfection.”
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