I first realised things were really changing in pop culture when Nosferatu (2024) became a huge hit.
A period-accurate remake of a century-old silent horror movie that follows a wheezing, putrid, child-killing corpse and a girl who spends most of her screen time convulsing with intense psychosexual visions about said corpse? Suffice it to say, I did not expect it to do as well at the box office as it did. Before long, there was nary a Hear Me Out Cake that didn’t feature a little moustachioed Count Orlok.
After that, the Gothic ball really started rolling. This is more than a micro-trend – this ‘Gothenaissance’ is a cultural movement.
Just look at Wednesday star Jenna Ortega’s red carpet looks, and at Chappell Roan’s custom Mugler nipple ring dress. At Lady Gaga’s Mayhem era, and at Margot Robbie’s press tour outfits for “Wuthering Heights” – a Gothic literature adaptation that is almost guaranteed to keep dominating the discourse (for better and for worse) for weeks to come.
Pinterest Predicts has named ‘vamp romantic’ as a top trend for 2026, sharing that searches for ‘dark romantic makeup’ are up 160%, and ‘vampire beauty’ is up 90%. Annabelle Taurua, beauty expert at Fresha, also points out that TikTok searches for ‘Gothic glam’ rose by over 1,000% just last week.
Then there’s the 2026 Oscar nods. It’s rare enough for even one horror film to get a ‘Big Five’ nomination (justice for Toni Collette). But this year, Sinners, Weapons, and, Gothiest of all, Frankenstein are all up for Academy Awards, and between Sinners and Frankenstein, four out of five Big Five categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay) are covered. Then there’s the small fact that Sinners is the first film ever to get 16 Oscar nominations.
Do I expect to see Margot Robbie rocking up to Slimelight painted like Siouxsie Sioux when she’s done promoting “Wuthering Heights”? No, sadly, I do not. The Goth subculture might not be any bigger than it ever has been, but its aesthetics and its passions are bleeding into everyday life like never before.
As Annabelle tells me: “It’s not just about what’s visually striking, but about the way people are using style to express emotion and personality. With such a combination of cultural momentum and personal resonance, I think that this aesthetic has real staying power, and I expect we’ll continue to see it evolve throughout the year.”
Agustina Panzoni, head of culture strategy at trend and media platform Death to Stock (DTS) agrees, saying: “When the Gothic resurfaces simultaneously across film, fashion, music, and design… that points to real cultural appetite.”
Fall in love again and again.
And where might this cultural appetite be coming from? A big factor could be the permacrisis we’re all living through.
The news cycle is consistently full of nightmares, like Trump, the Epstein files, the climate crisis (remember that?), and the killings in Iran and Gaza, to name just a few. And then there’s the lingering spectre of the pandemic to contend with.
Anna Waletzko, a senior behavioural analyst with cultural and consumer insights agency Canvas8, says Goth aesthetics can almost serve as a kind of “psychological armour.”
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.”
“I'm not sexualising him, I just find him very attractive.”
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.
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.”
And then there’s the AI anxiety of it all. “As a result,” says Anna, “consumers are pivoting toward aesthetics that feel tactile, ancient, and deeply human.”
Agustina echoes a similar sentiment. “Gothic has always been tactile: velvet, lace, silver, stone, shadow,” she points out. “It insists on weight and texture when everything else has gone frictionless and dematerialised.”
This is why the Gothic has bled into so many corners of pop culture simultaneously. “Gothic gives us a visual language for complexity, vulnerability, and longing,” Agustina adds.
The catharsis and rebellion embedded in things like this Gothenaissance – things that feel deeply real and complex in an era in which we spend too much time scrolling past endless reams of catastrophes, AI slop, and, until very recently, nigh-on identical ‘clean girls’ – isn’t just a breath of fresh air.
It’s vital.
