Goth Blog Challenge: How I first found out about Goth fashion

I just found out about Darkstalker Girl's Goth Blog Challenge, which can be found here. It's based on F Yeah Lolita's Lolita 52 challenge. I liked the idea of participating and like F Yeah Lolita I'll be answering them in a random order. I didn't have a jar to put the slips of paper in so I used a random number generator =]

The first one it picked out was:

How I first found out about Goth fashion

I'm glad this question is specific because the ways I found out about Goth music and Goth fashion were very different. I grew up listening to Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees (Thanks to my dad! His music taste is awesome and eclectic) but I didn't know anything about Goth fashion until I was older.

When I was 10 or 11, and already running around in a black velvet tunic top, purple velvet flares and a purple velvet dog collar, all of which I still own... The flares I don't have a picture of right now (I promise to obtain one, soon!), but here's the dog collar (I was 18 in this picture).

I saw some girls on the bus one day whose style really opened my eyes. They were wearing really cute frilled  blouses, one had a black skirt, the other a red tartan one, both with fishnets and Doc Martens. They looked like china dolls to me, so beautiful and delicate. Then I noticed one of them was carrying a bag like this:

Source: Alchemy Gothic

I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen (I grew up really loving Halloween, witches, vampires, The Addams Family and Harry Potter, all of which may have contributed to the morbid streak...). My mum who was with me on the bus told me the girls were goths. I wanted to dress like that too, even the frills (which considering the Tomboy I'd been when I was younger, surprised even me!)

However it was several years before I really did dress like that, because as beautiful as I thought the girls looked I didn't have the confidence to dress that way (especially in our close-minded little village). In the end I even ditched the velvet in favor of blue jeans and t-shirts for a while (ages 12 to 14), in hopes I wouldn't get bullied when I moved to a new school, I really wanted to 'fit in'. My route to gothdom was a long slow one after that; you can see some of the process in this post.