Dark Academia, Once Again

types of dark academia

classic academia: beige trench coats, wool sweaters. plaid skirts. think femme fatale, but educated. sobbing in bed late at night over the secret history or dead poets society. tea with milk and sugar. subsequent tea stains.

darkest academia: running through the rain, dimly lit by streetlights. brown tweed jackets, dress shoes. cold fingers and colder gazes. french-pressed black coffee, piping hot. dark, candlelit rooms with ancient wood floors/walls. 

light academia: white cable-knit sweaters, sparkly eyes and foggy glasses. going to art museums and falling in love with every portrait, every sculpture. caressing the petals of a rose, hearing the crinkle of leaves underfoot.

witchy academia: burning candles while reading or doing homework. black turtlenecks, velvet skirts. walking through the forest in autumn. passing a graveyard and feeling a greyish presence. waiting anxiously for samhain.

romantic academia: writing flowery poetry about someone you’ll never speak to (guilty oops). a cozy alizarin sweater, pleated skirts. slow dancing around your room to the beatles. curling up with warm, pallid cups of tea and a book.

scholarly academia: impeccable notes in class. leather bound bags crammed with textbooks and pens. lots of coffee with scones, and even more late nights. a wide vocabulary (that people constantly comment on). lives in the library.

theatre academia: shakespeare, all the time - quoting, reading, praying for a school production of a midsummer nights dream. or the crucible. memorizing lines in the wings. taking on your character’s traits, even outside the theater.

i really like being pretentious and all but what i actually like even more is that i'm genuinely so invested in this hunt for knowledge that i'm on. like,,,, i do wanna know every work of shakespeare by heart and i do wanna read the night away draped over second hand philosophy books and a worn out volume of the illiad and i do wanna quote french poetry and oscar wilde at social events and i wanna be what history would call an intellectual and i wanna live and breathe these things i care about because i have a deep and consuming passion for them and i want to be as immersed in them as possible.

how to stop endlessly analyzing your own behavior as if you were a scientific experiment

Dark Academia Lifestyle

Remain an enigma, talk less about yourself. In social situations, make it a game, even if you are a rather social person, to shroud yourself in mystery. If others show interest in you, answer vaguely. Disappear at specific times. Reveal little of your background. When you do speak, speak in riddles or quotes. That isn’t to say you should never speak up in class or in debates, have opinions and remain socially active; however, keep people guessing a lot of the time, and, if you’re really into it, only speak when spoken to.

Wear vintage clothes, elegant accessories, monochrome colors. Emphasize sharp features with purely dark or light colors and jewel tones. I usually find nice vintage clothes at random thrift stores. Keep an open mind.

Listen to jazz and classical music. Listening to older, more tasteful music brings a spark of elegance to your life. I, personally, like to hear the used jazz vinyls crackle. There are multiple types of dark academia; to me, jazz demonstrates the erratic artist spirit of revolutionaries, while classical music possesses me with the sophisticated spirit of a Classicist who has preparing tea down to a science.

Light candles. Doing things such as writing, reading, and getting ready for bed by candlelight makes it seem thrice as elegant and academic… going to sleep so late never looked so enticing. On the other hand, you could wake up before dawn, light some candles, and study or read. 

Stay ahead in school. Read your textbooks ahead of time, write essays about anything you’d like at all, just for practice. If you’re learning about something in science, devise experiments to illustrate the concepts to yourself and make them easy to remember. If you’re reading a book in English, read a handful of articles about the author beforehand to prepare, write down quotes from the book, make essay pitches, write to your heart’s content a critique of the book, an analysis of the book, of gender roles in the book. In history courses, find articles about the subject matter, annotate them, and write about them. If you’re taking a math class, devise applications of the concepts and solve problems of your own creation.

Go to libraries, museums, bookshops, and coffee shops. These are all really good places to sit in the corner and read for hours on end. Not only do you get Mysterious Points but you get an aesthetic environment and (hopefully) some peace in which to devour literature. I know that in the upcoming term, I’m going to be in the library from opening time to closing time every day.

Make Ancient Roman or Greek food. To be honest, the food was of so much better quality than it often is today, so I would suggest looking into some ancient cuisine archives to look for some recipes for your dinner party. Not only is it most of the time much better than modern food, but it’s also much more elegant. Not to mention it is fun and enlightening to try recipes which are perhaps completely foreign to  you.

Have routines. Perhaps your life is erratic, but you can feel some semblance of order and elegance by creating rituals for, perhaps, everything. You might start the day off with a walk around the neighborhood or a nearby pond. I start my writing sessions by 1) playing jazz 2)opening my windows 3)reading Belief and Technique for Modern Prose 4)chugging a whole glass of water really fast 5) breathing violently. Feel free to make up really weird Winding Down routines, like, I don’t know, closing all your windows, stripping down, and meditating for 20 minutes before you go to sleep. Literally anything. It doesn’t even have to be useful, it just has to be strange.

Hang stuff up on your walls. Postcards, paintings, drawings, poetry, snippets from books, moodboards, your routines, lists (places you want to go, people you want to meet, things you want to do), playlists. Make it yourself and make it chaotic and, most importantly, make it aesthetic.

READ. Read anything and everything educational. Do it. Just, don’t pick up your phone for 3 days because you’re reading, just ignore everything else. Good things to read would be: feminist literature, nonfiction, mystery novels, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier…

vintage astronomy

Dark Academia things I do without noticing

- Having a ridiculous amount of tabs open of Wikipedia pages about ancient paintings, essays about Plato’s books and information about ivy league university’s.

- Listening to Hozier, Lana del Rey, classical music and slowed down versions of pop songs.

- Carrying notebooks, now twice the size as they were when I first bought them, filled with notes, paintings, lose papers with sketches and Latin words and their definition. 

- Finishing a book and immediately starting another one.

- Staying up till sunrise while drinking tea and reading poetry.

“In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”

— Donna Tartt, in this 2013 interview by Laurie Grassi for Chatelaine (via boykeats)

you don’t need to go to a prestigious university or an exclusive boarding school to get dark academia vibes. you can be a pretentious brooding scholar at your local public high school as well. leave books on renaissance paintings and ancient rituals open on library desks. write ominous notes in the margins of textbooks. quote byron on the bathroom stall door. wear an unmistakable scent of perfume, so when you enter a classroom, everyone knows that you’ve arrived. cut your hair in the sink of the science lab. slip roses into random lockers. surround yourself with a few number of close friends and form your own secret circle. gain a reputation. have whispers follow you down the hallways. I would, however, advise against murder.

“Hence I sit fearless on my goat, My naked charms displaying.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from “Faust I”, published p. 1808.

The 16 types as their icks!!

Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and everything else @mbtitime and @typefy