“October is my favorite month,” said the writer Tish Weinstock, who was sitting on a bench in the cemetery of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan staring out at the grave of Alexander Hamilton.
Ms. Weinstock, 34, is a beauty editor for System magazine in London and the author of the newly published book “How to Be a Goth: Notes on Undead Style.”
“I don’t know what to wear for Halloween,” she said. “It’s an excuse to go shopping.”
Halloween, one might say, is her Christmas.
“I look like a witch with pale skin and dark hair and a big nose,” she said, laughing. “Either I get a nose job and dye my hair blond or lean into what I have.”
She certainly looked the part of a mistress of the dark, dressed all in black, in a vintage John Galliano outfit and Prada suede boots. Little tattoos of crosses, hearts and the phrase “hand in glove” — a song by the Smiths — decorated her hands and wrists.
Her book came to be after she wrote a story for British Vogue, where she is a contributing editor, about Morticia Addams, the matriarch of the Addams family. But it was in equal parts inspired by “How to Be a Woman” by the feminist writer Caitlin Moran and “Luella’s Guide to English Style” by the designer Luella Bartley.
“But more macabre,” Ms. Weinstock said.
The book is part memoir. “Growing up, I wasn’t like other kids, those bonny blond girls in their pink satin party dresses, preferring instead to wear frocks in red and crushed black velvet,” Ms. Weinstock wrote. “I was never interested in being a princess, either.”
She grew up in South Kensington and Wiltshire in southwest England, where her family went on weekends. Her father died when she was 5 years old, and her older sisters were at boarding school. “My mum was dealing with grief,” she said last week, “and I spent a lot of time alone, left to my own devices.”
Her entry into goth culture came via 1990s teen culture, watching “The Craft,” “The Crow” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” She read “Frankenstein” and “The Bloody Chamber.”
“I like anything dark and subversive,” she said. “I was always quite private about my interests. I wish I could have been more bold and brave in my likes. I wasn’t like, ‘OK, guys let’s have a seance.’ The easiest way to survive school is to try and assimilate.”
She missed the 1980s heyday of goth music, like the Damned, Sisters of Mercy and Siouxsie and the Banshees, although that era is covered in the book.
Ms. Weinstock did not want to be overly prescriptive about what being goth was or was not, but rather she casts a wide net of inspiration for forays into the dark side: art, beauty and shopping guides. Illisa’s Vintage Lingerie in Manhattan is cited for its antique slips for “pastoral goth summer moments.” (Yes, summer can be goth.)
Ms. Weinstock does not hesitate to embrace more contemporary goths in her book, including the singer Doja Cat for her “sepulchral aesthetic,” and Rick Owens, whom she calls “fashion’s dark overlord and health goth daddy.” She includes style checklists — leather jackets, corsets, a touch of Victorian — for aspiring goths and pertinent history from the dark ages to the “Twilight” franchise.
The book is illustrated throughout with black-clad kittens and puppies, broken hearts and spider webs. (For those in need of dark décor, Aurel Schmidt, the artist, will have them available to order, with instructions on her Instagram account.)
“Culturally we are entering a dark, more saturnine era,” said Ms. Weinstock, who studied art history at Oxford. “We have ‘Beetlejuice’ back, ‘Nosferatu’ is coming out, these dark and gothic runway shows. These are trying times, and culture is reflecting that back. Sometimes it helps to lean into the darkness to come to terms with harsh realities rather than try to escape from it.”
For Halloween this year, Ms. Weinstock’s husband, Tom Guinness, a stylist (and grandson of Diana Mitford, who infamously left her husband for Oswald Mosley, the head of Britain’s prewar Fascist party), is going as Nosferatu. They married two years ago, on Halloween, in a wedding at Belvoir Castle, a 356-room pile in the English countryside with soaring neo-Gothic towers and turrets. I thought, What does a wedding look like in our world?” she said.
The dress code was “black tie gothic.” Kate Moss, whose observation, “There’s a bit of goth in us all,” is on the book’s cover, was a guest.
“We are bringing up baby goths,” she said of her children, Reuben, 5, and Phoenix, 1.
Pregnancy, Ms. Weinstock said, was, at least in her experience, very goth. She was depressed and played online word games under the name Fang with an avatar of a white wolf.
“I know there are Earth mothers out there, and it’s great for them, but I felt like there was this alien inside of me,” she said. “The idea of death sort of permeates the stretch of pregnancy, and you could die and your baby could die and you’re confronted with mortality.”
Ms. Weinstock’s nanny when she was growing up is now her children’s nanny. “I’m still kind of like the child,” she said.
As the sun began to set and the cemetery closed, Ms. Weinstock showed off a treasure she found for her son at a costume shop. She pulled a detached eyeball made of plastic out of her small, black Lady Dior bag.
“I showed it to him over Zoom,” she said. He asked if it was food. “I said, No, you can’t eat the severed eye.”
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