I get called all four of these in my comments, usually within the same hour. They're not the same, and the difference isn't really about clothes — it's about music and about when each one happened. Here's the short version.
Goth: post-punk, about 1979
Goth came out of post-punk right at the end of the seventies. Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure as they got darker, then Sisters of Mercy and the whole 80s wave after that.
The look followed the music, not the other way round: Victorian and mourning references, black, silver, lace, heavy eye makeup on all genders. It's the oldest of the four by a long way and it's still going, which is why goths get particular about the label. It's a forty-year-old subculture with actual history behind it, not a look someone invented for a camera.
Emo: hardcore, about 1985, then enormous in 2003
Emo started as 'emotional hardcore' in the mid-80s DC punk scene — that's the bit most people don't know. It stayed underground through the 90s with bands like Sunny Day Real Estate and American Football, and then in the early 2000s it broke completely mainstream.
That mainstream version is what most people mean now: side fringe, skinny jeans, studded belts, the bands everyone can name. Musically it's closer to punk and rock than goth ever was, and emotionally it's outward and confessional rather than atmospheric.
Scene: myspace, about 2005
Scene is the brightest of the four and the shortest-lived. Mid-2000s, built on myspace, teased hair, neon over black, coontails, raccoon eyes, and a lot of hair clips.
Musically it pulled from post-hardcore and crunkcore and it was fundamentally upbeat — that's the real split from emo, which people confuse it with constantly. Emo was sad. Scene was hyper. They shared a fringe and almost nothing else.
E-girl: the internet, about 2018
E-girl isn't a subculture, it's an aesthetic, and it's the only one of the four that was born on camera. Blush across the nose and under the eyes, hair clips, split-dye, chains, the little heart or star under the eye. It's designed to read well in a front-facing shot, and it borrows from all three of the others plus anime.
That's not a criticism — it's just a different kind of thing. It has no attached genre of music and no scene you go to. Which is exactly why calling a goth an e-girl annoys people: it's swapping forty years of subculture for an internet look that's about six years old.
The honest test
Ask what someone listens to. That's it. Everything else is fashion that travels between all four, but the music is what each one was actually built on.
And none of this is a purity test. Wear what you like, listen to what you like, mix all four if you want. Just know that when you use the words, they do mean specific different things to the people who were there for them.
Four different decades, four different sounds, one shared eyeliner technique. That's the whole answer.
More of me being insufferable about music is on my page.
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