'Dark academia' is Gen Z's favourite look – but can a grown-up wear the collegiate trend?
telegraph.co.uk1.2 million Instagram posts and 1.5 billion views on TikTok, geek chic has evolved – and it’s more powerful than ever.Though the term has been around for a few years now, the dark academia aesthetic – and its counterpoint, 'light academia', which as far as I can tell is the same but in beige – exploded in popularity during the pandemic, while schools and universities were closed.
Because there’s nothing like lockdown to make you nostalgic for the smell of carpet tiles and canteen baked potatoes. But this isn’t style via your local comprehensive.
It’s a romanticised, nostalgic spin on scholastic chic that takes in the dreaming spires of Oxford, the leaf-strewn lawns of Yale, the shadowy melodrama of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and the goody two-shoes glamour of Gossip Girl’s Blair Waldorf.
There’s classical music, Greek myth and gothic architecture. There are shades of beatnik, touches of Victoriana, a little Dead Poets Society and a lot of nineties-does-seventies-does-thirties-does-Brontë-heroine-dying-of-a-chill.
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