Rose Mortem | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Known for | Gothic Fashion |
Label | Rose Mortem |
Spouse | Ashton Nyte |
Website | rosemortem |
Rose Mortem is an American fashion designer, musician, model, and entrepreneur. Rose is most widely known for her dark romantic fashion stylings and as a member of the Gothic rock band The Awakening. She is a graduate of Harvard University. [1]
Launching in 1998, the Rose Mortem fashion label was featured in several publications including Mick Mercer's cult classic, 21st Century Goth. [2] Her work was frequently featured in goth subculture magazines including Gothic Beauty, Cynfeirdd, Terrorizer, and Fangoria. Rose also created fashions for independent films and theatre productions, and live performers of varying kinds including members of several bands, symphonies, operas and chamber music ensembles. [3] Use of velvets, chiffons, satins, tulles and lace with sharply angled hemlines and layered skirting became the label's trademark style. [4] As a musician, Rose is linked most notably with gothic rock band The Awakening of South Africa and has been married to the band's front man Ashton Nyte since 2009. [5] In addition to live touring, she is credited with taking several of the band's album photographs and has filmed and appeared in many of their music videos. [6]
According to interviews with Rose, her designs are inspired greatly by musicians, ranging widely in style, from David Bowie to Loretta Lynn. [7] [ not specific enough to verify ] The designer also draws on her studies of Bohemianism, Dark Romanticism, and love for the literature, art and music of the Decadent movement. She credits her knowledge of fashion design entirely to her mother and grandmother's instruction, and to her "youthful passion for dissecting thrift store wedding gowns." Rose attributes her creativity to her eccentric upbringing by a non-nuclear family of various artists, and her long-time obsession with "making fashions that feel like music." [8]
In 2009, Rose Mortem announced a partnership with South African record label Intervention Arts to distribute The Awakening's albums in the US. Shortly thereafter, Rose joined the band on piano and keyboards, and was featured in their 2009 release entitled Tales of Absolution and Obsoletion and the single Fault released on the band's 2014 Anthology XV compilation. Rose describes her latest fashion since joining The Awakening as "combining the elegance and extravagance of classic New Wave and Gothic fashion with touches of Bohemian elegance and Lolita chic — updated and reinvented for the modern world." [4] In a 2015 Gothic Beauty magazine feature, the artist states her latest fashion stylings are directly inspired by her most recent music collaborations with rocker husband Ashton Nyte.
In 2019, Rose Mortem announced to fans that she was taking a hiatus from running her company; in 2021, she announced that after twenty years, she was stopping work in fashion to focus on music and her chosen field of Industrial-Organizational Psychology. [1]
Goth is a music-based subculture that began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. It was developed by fans of gothic rock, an offshoot of the post-punk music genre. Post-punk artists who presaged the gothic rock genre and helped develop and shape the subculture include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division.
Gothic rock is a style of rock music that emerged from post-punk in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. The first post-punk bands which shifted toward dark music with gothic overtones include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus, and the Cure.
Gothic fashion is a clothing style marked by dark, mysterious, antiquated, homogeneous, and often genderless features. It is worn by members of the Goth subculture. Dress, typical gothic fashion includes dyed black hair, exotic hairstyles, dark lipstick and dark clothing. Both male and female goths can wear dark eyeliner, dark nail polish and lipstick for a dramatic effect. Male goths use cosmetics at a higher rate than other men. Styles are often borrowed from the punk fashion and can also draw influence from Victorians and Elizabethan fashion. Goth fashion is sometimes confused with heavy metal fashion and emo fashion.
Dark wave is a music genre that emerged from the new wave and post-punk movement of the late 1970s. Dark wave compositions are largely based on minor key tonality and introspective lyrics and have been perceived as being dark, romantic and bleak, with an undertone of sorrow. The genre embraces a range of styles including cold wave, ethereal wave, gothic rock, neoclassical dark wave and neofolk.
A rivethead or rivet head is a person associated with the industrial dance music scene. In stark contrast to the original industrial culture, whose performers and heterogeneous audience were sometimes referred to as "industrialists", the rivethead scene is a coherent youth culture closely linked to a discernible fashion style. The scene emerged in the late 1980s on the basis of electro-industrial, EBM, and industrial rock music. The associated dress style draws on military fashion and punk aesthetics with hints of fetish wear, mainly inspired by the scene's musical protagonists.
Mick Mercer is a journalist and author best known for his books, photos and reviews of the goth, punk and indie music scenes.
Specimen are a British band founded in the 1980s. Their music has been described as spanning many different genres of music, including glam, goth, punk and post-punk, and the band is widely credited as one of the pioneers of the goth subculture, both musically and stylistically.
The Batcave was a weekly club-night launched at 69 Dean Street in central London in 1982. It is considered to be the birthplace of the Southern English goth subculture. It lent its name to the term Batcaver, used to describe fans of the original gothic rock music, who would adorn themselves in Batwing coffin necklaces to distinguish themselves from other goth clubs.
Ethereal wave, also called ethereal darkwave, ethereal goth or simply ethereal, is a subgenre of dark wave music that is variously described as "gothic", "romantic", and "otherworldly". Developed in the early 1980s in the UK as an outgrowth of gothic rock, ethereal wave was mainly represented by 4AD bands such as Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and early guitar-driven Dead Can Dance.
Gothic Beauty is an American magazine established by editor Steven Holiday in the fall of 2000 after the success of the Internet social group of the same name. Gothic Beauty covers numerous aspects of underground culture including fashion, music, events and various forms of entertainment. Issues have included interviews with such Goth and Goth-friendly musicians as Alice Cooper, Diamanda Galás, KMFDM, Rasputina, Midnight Syndicate and Peter Murphy. Also featured are interviews with fashion designers and other icons of the gothic and alternative subcultures, and myriad music reviews. Their main office is located in Portland, Oregon.
Alternative fashion or Alt fashion is fashion that stands apart from mainstream commercial fashion. Alternative fashion includes the fashions of specific subcultures such as emo, scene, goth subculture, hip hop, cyberpunk, kawaii, cottagecore, goblincore, 70's core, and Lolita fashion; however, it is not limited to these. In general, alternative, or 'alt', fashion does not conform to widely popular style trends of the times that have widespread popularity. It may exhibit itself as a fringe style – extremely attention-grabbing and more artistic than practical – but it can also develop from anti-fashion sentiments that focus on simplistic utilitarian drives.
The Toronto goth scene, the cultural locus of the goth subculture in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and the associated music and fashion scene, has distinct origins from goth scenes of other goth subcultural centres, such as the UK or Germany. Originally known as the "Batcavers", the term "goth" appeared only after 1988, when it was applied to the pre-existent subculture. Distinctive features included internationally recognized gothic and vampiric fashion store 'Siren', a goth-industrial bar named 'Sanctuary: The Vampire Sex Bar', and Forever Knight, a television series about an 800-year-old vampire living in Toronto. In Toronto, the goths did not seek to reject mainstream status, and achieved partial acceptance throughout the mid to late 1990s.
The Awakening is a South African gothic rock band founded in Johannesburg in 1995 by vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Ashton Nyte. The sound has been described as a hybrid of gothic rock, darkwave, gothic metal, industrial rock, and new wave – a combination that was loosely described by Nyte in 1999 as "dark future rock." The Awakening has released eleven studio albums, several singles, EPs, and two greatest hits compilations in total. As of 2009, The Awakening has been based in the United States.
Ethereal Menace is the third album by South African gothic rock band The Awakening released in July 1999. The album utilizes elements of industrial music, a style later dubbed as "dark future rock" by Nyte. Another music video was produced by South African Music Awards winner, director Eban Olivier's Concrete Productions, for the single "The March." The video was placed in rotation on MTV Europe.
Cauda Pavonis are an English deathrock band founded in 1998, by Su Farr and Dave Wainwright. Originally conceived as a 'dark romantic' experience, Cauda Pavonis broke onto the UK goth circuit supporting acts such as Star Industry and Inkubus Sukkubus. At the outset Cauda Pavonis were noted for their consciously-minimalist synthesized melodies and their use of live drums. They were described by Mick Mercer in his book 21st Century Goth as a "Dark duo from UK with a bright future" and by Starvox as "The most old school sounding goth since Rozz Williams hung himself". Since then the line-up has grown and the band have appeared twice at the Whitby Gothic Weekend and the Wave-Gotik-Treffen. In 2003 and again in 2007, Cauda Pavonis were the focus of the ITV television programme, Magick Eve.
Ashton Nyte is a South African-born singer, songwriter, producer, composer, author, actor, and frontman of the gothic rock band The Awakening. Nyte has released seven solo albums, in addition to eleven albums as The Awakening and several other projects and collaborations. He is considered to be a pioneer of alternative music in South Africa, and has been described as "something of a musical genius" for his typical method of composing, playing and recording each instrument himself on most of his releases. Nyte is widely known in South Africa for his chart-topping cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" and several other top singles. His signature style combines baritone vocals, garnering comparisons to David Bowie and Johnny Cash, with instrumentation that ranges from lyric-driven acoustic folk, to alternative rock, to post-punk and electronic music, as well as a penchant for the theatrical. Nyte has been based in the US since 2009.
Natasha Scharf is an author, disc jockey, presenter and journalist best known for her work publicising gothic, rock, metal and progressive metal music and subcultures. Since 2019, she has been the Deputy Editor of Prog.
Rhombus are a British gothic rock band based in West Yorkshire, England.
Wednesday Mourning is an American actress and model. She specializes in the Goth subculture and has been influential in goth fashion, as well as being the celebrity spokesmodel for Atelier Gothique and appearing as a model for the band My Chemical Romance's CD Welcome To The Black Parade. She was awarded 2010 Goth Day Model of the year and LA Weekly’s Goth Girl of the Week, and since 2012, Mourning has been a co-star on Oddities: San Francisco, a Science Channel program. Mourning is also curator of an esoteric bookstore, Orphic Vellum Books, the only one of its kind in the U.S. She has appeared in several publications including Gothic Beauty and Elle Magazine and is a writing contributor for Celtic Family Magazine.