Dark Academia Is Just Academia

Dark academia looks like everything I was taught to want: heavy wool coats, battered books, Oxfords echoing down stone hallways, coffee cooling beside a half‑finished draft. It sells us a fantasy where learning is decadent, suffering is romantic, and a blazer can turn a burned‑out grad student into a tragic heroine.

I know that fantasy from the inside. I was the first‑gen kid who used homework to drown out screaming in the next room, the teenager who realized education might literally be a way out, the adult who ended up in a PhD program and later working at NIH. For people like me, school was survival, it was life.

That’s why dark academia as a fashion trend sits so strangely with me. On the surface, it’s just “boarding school meets goth enthusiast”: tweed, turtlenecks, pleats, loafers, dark lipstick, a moody palette of black, forest, burgundy, and tobacco. Underneath, the visual language is built from institutions that have always been about gatekeeping. Elite universities, old boys’ clubs, secret societies, and spaces that historically excluded women, poor and working‑class kids, and people of color.

Misogyny and elitism show up in who gets harassed, who gets believed, whose clothes are considered “professional,” whose body is watched more closely in the hallway. I’ve watched trainees in crisis because the system they worked their whole lives to enter turned out to be hostile, extractive, and indifferent to their mental health. Online that same system is romanticized: depression as a candlelit desk shot, insomnia as “study grind,” institutional violence as a cute Latin quote.

None of this is abstract. You have to be wealthy, white, cis, able‑bodied, and male to belong. The 19th News published a powerful piece by Jessica Kutz critically examining the receipts for how deep the boys’ club runs. Recent releases of the Epstein files show powerful scientists and funders explicitly strategizing to keep women out of elite STEM spaces, mocking their bodies and doubting their intelligence in writing. That’s the same ecosystem dark academia romanticizes: the conferences you’re not invited to, the fellowships you never hear about, the rooms where your body and your outfit are discussed before your work.

If the only way to be read as “serious” is to cosplay the old regime, then are our clothes are protecting us by erasing us?

I’m not interested in telling people to stop loving dark academia or to claim that fashion can fix these broken systems. I just want us to imagine what happens if we keep the intellectual drama and mood, but change who the silhouette centers? Swap the Eurocentric prep school references for alt silhouettes, disabled and fat bodies, Black and brown romantic leads, trans scholars in lace and leather who don’t have to tone themselves down to be believed. What if “academic” means corsets over hoodies, Docs with sari fabric, harnesses with thesis drafts? If they are going to talk anyway, why not give them something to chew on?

I don't believe that dark academia is worth romanticizing generally, but I do believe in romanticizing . the desire for thought, depth, mystery, study, and community. Those are the parts I want to dress for.

3RD IRIS is my refusal to let elitist institutions own the look of being a thinker.