Fearing that her popularity among young voters has fallen to a critically low point, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has adopted a so-called “gothic” look to appeal to millennials whom her advisors describe as suffering from angst and alienation.

“We were hemorrhaging support to that [expletive] hippie Bernie Sanders, so we put drab ol’ Hillary in front of a mirror and asked ourselves some really tough questions, like if her style really speaks to today’s disaffected youth,” said David Gibbons, a longtime Clinton strategist who, as a high school student in the early 1990s, wore only black and went by the name Raven.

Clinton showcased her new look at an event in Iowa on Wednesday, speaking at a 4-H club while dressed in an Edwardian corset, a lacy black dress, knee-high studded boots and a variety of occult jewelry.

“Look around, my fellow Americans, and you’ll see that everything is in a state of decay,” Clinton said. “The only certainty in life is death, and it is death we must espouse if we are to live fully.”

“I say it’s time for a new political aesthetic, that we find beauty in the macabre,” she said. “If you elect me as president, I’ll paint the White House black, permit the lawns to wither and die, and I’ll turn the Lincoln Bedroom into a mock funeral parlor. Visiting heads of state will be forced to confront their own mortality. Instead of backing down from [Russian president] Vladimir Putin at a UN summit, I’ll present him with the skull of a beloved Victorian poet.”

When asked what advantage she has over her Democratic rivals, Clinton pointed to the two terms she served in the Senate, experience she gained while heading the State Department, and her mint-condition collection of all 13 albums released by the Cure.

“Bernie, Joe [Biden], Martin [O’Malley], Larry [Lessig], they’re all dead, but they don’t even know it yet,” she said. “Even worse, they are mundane. They bore me.”

A spokesperson for the Clinton 2016 campaign insists that while the transformation may appear to be a cheap political stunt, it actually reflects the candidate’s deepest — and until recently, most secret — beliefs.

“Long before she was a grandmother in a lime-green pantsuit building up her foreign policy credentials, Hillary Clinton was an angry young outsider who despised the conformity of her peers,” one staffer said. “Few know this, but while living in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion in the 1980s, Ms. Clinton was a prolific writer of Anne Rice fan fiction, and she used to dye her hair black until Bill told her it was unbecoming.”

The last time a presidential candidate went through such a rapid transformation was in 2012, when Texas governor Rick Perry dropped out of the Republican primary race, only to rename himself Aileen and attempt re-enter as a woman.