God I feel old and I’m only 23. I haven’t engaged in this debate since I was 17ish. Ahhh those were the days, when the fashion/music was considered serious enough a problem to merit a second of thought.

As for the Goth thing, they appeared, like Magnus said, around the first century, and they were a group of tribes, none of whom looked or dressed gothicly. Because they were seen as ushering in the middle ages, it became a renascence slur to call anything in a medieval style Gothic, hence our modern usage of ‘medieval looking’.