When BuzzFeed News visited Whitby for this October’s goth festival, groups dressed in elaborate costumes of corsets, cloaks, and top hats — all black, of course — packed the windswept seaside town.

Others wore band T-shirts bearing names such as goth-classic Inkubus Sukkubus, metal-clad New Rock boots, and long, dark wool coats, that they’d be as likely to wear at home as at a goth festival, representing a more purist school who are there for the music not the fancy dress spectacle.

Whether the former are considered true goths depends who you ask. Goth is “probably the longest argument in subcultural history,” Tim Sinister, editor of the Blogging Goth, writes in a post titled “What Is Goth?” “Goth remains a haven of petty contradictions,” he continues. “Goth is a grand old cliché and therefore will ever remain, undead…”

Both factions seem to co-exist in relative harmony, according to Sinister, who counts himself as a full-time goth, and comes to Whitby for the music.