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“We live in Gothic times,” asserted Angela Carter in 1974, a much‐quoted statement that has come to define the postwar era (Carter 1995: 460). Gothic has become incrementally more prevalent in Western culture as the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries have gone on. By the end of the twentieth century it was arguably more popular, and certainly more diverse, than it had ever been since the peak of the Gothic novel's production in the 1790s. As a result it is difficult to impose a single narrative on postwar Gothic: rather, it has developed in a multitude of different and sometimes overlapping directions. The main distinguishing features of Gothic in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, however, are extreme generic hybridity, hermeneutical self‐awareness, and globalization.

Fashion is perhaps the ultimate decadent medium: fashionable dress has been critiqued by moralists for extravagance, luxury, and sexual licentiousness since classical times. This chapter focuses on fashion since the Industrial Revolution, when mass textile production and the rapid dissemination of Parisian styles across Europe and America enabled the development of a rapidly changing fashion system. It shows how, within emergent modernity, decadent dress was characterized by its embrace of artifice; this reached its apotheosis in dandyism and the cult of extraordinary individuality, whereby sartorial expression is used to make the body into a work of art. The chapter examines the gendering of decadent fashion and the figure of the female dandy; and finally appraises the contemporary fashion industry’s embrace of beauty in decay. It concludes that far from an evacuation of moral responsibility, the decadence of fashion may be a means of astute political commentary.