How does fashion shape adolescence? Every month, Claire Healy deconstructs the ways that style culture has contributed to the idea of the teenager in new series Extreme Adolescents

In a photograph taken by Simon Baker in 1977, Siouxsie Sioux carefully applies bright make-up in a handheld mirror. Transforming her eyes into geometric art, she wears sparkling earrings and a hot-pink blouse. By the early 80s, her fearless look would become iconic, empowering teenaged, raven-haired acolytes up and down the country: she was their ‘godmother of goth’. But Sioux herself always resisted that label. As she would later refer to it, “the doom, the black” – what did the witty effervescence of the Banshees have to do with all that?

Divorced from the style’s roots in the fashion provocateurs of the 1980s, today’s perennial goth – sitting at your bus stop, looking awkward on the beach – can be easy to dismiss. But before the health goth, mall goth, and even the term ‘goth’ was used to describe these children of darkness at all, the movement’s beginnings are intriguing and complex. In its original form, goth style was as much about startling individualism as belonging to a clique: something encapsulated by Sioux’s exotic make-up, bejewelled gloves and nipple-baring fetish gear. In early-80s London, you might find Sioux so outfitted at the movement’s high church nestled in Soho’s backstreets, known as The Batcave.

“It’s a name that people know, even if they never went to it,” writes Liisa Ladouceur, author of the Encyclopedia Gothica. Founded by Olli Wisdom and his band Specimen, the Batcave was the hub of the burgeoning gothic rock scene from 1982 to 1986. The club’s regulars ran the gamut of goth’s hall of fame: there, you’d find Robert Smith, Nick Cave and, of course, Siouxsie and her Banshees watching shows by Specimen or Alien Sex Fiend. More than a club night, The Batcave hosted scary arthouse movies and cabaret nights. In 1983, it even produced a definitive compilation record, Young Limbs and Numb Hymns.

“In its original form, goth style was as much about startling individualism as belonging to a clique”

With the space decked out in all the hallmarks of a Halloween party – spiderwebs, coffins and bin liners – it was the DIY attitude to fashion that would really define The Batcave’s lasting aesthetic influence. Decades before the hot topic fashions preferred by today’s teens, the club’s attendees has no such choice in London’s retail environs. Instead, Batcavers would paint and customise their clothes using whatever they could lay their hands on, and the resulting looks defied gender norms: women’s tights for sleeves, vintage men’s suits and African jewellery were all aspects of the Batcave style that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with your neighbourhood goth today.

Pre-YouTube tutorials, there was an eclecticism also reflected in the beauty looks donned by the goths. Men and women wore make-up in widely different styles, whether inspired by the ghoulish facepaint of Alien Sex Fiend frontman Nik Fiend, or those heavy brows, Egyptian-lined eyes and sharp painted lips of Sioux’s. Others wore sunglasses indoors, as if to plunge their dark vision further into the shadows. In contrast to the battle lines later drawn between teen tribes, it didn’t really matter what you looked like: the club operated with an open-door policy, and welcomed anyone who sought a space to state their difference from the everyday.