The Contrived World Of Dark Academia Interior Design

Descending through the rabbit hole that is YouTube recently, we found ourselves in the world of Dark Academia as an interior design aesthetic. This was a phenomenon that had entirely passed me by, though Mrs R was familiar enough with it to warn me that “you’re going to hate this”. She wasn’t wrong.

Now, in theory, ‘dark academia’ ought to be something that I could fully get behind. If there is one thing that I hate more than anything about modern design trends, it’s the showroom minimalism of white walls and zero culture, places that don’t look as though anyone actually lives in them. You know the sort – even interior design and home improvement TV show features these bland, cultureless palaces of pretension, where everything looks as though no one actually lives there and where every bit of furniture, every picture on the walls and every magazine on the coffee table has been carefully arranged. Whenever I’ve caught shows like Grand Designs, I find myself asking “Where are their books? Their records? Their TV? Their anything?”. Everywhere looks cold and antiseptic, without any sort of hint that the people who live there do anything of the evening apart from artfully pose on their designer chairs, basking in their own good taste.

So ‘dark academia’, with its emphasis on dark, cosy colours, vintage decor, clunky old machines, retro fashion and heaving bookcases should be right up my street. And perhaps it is when done with a level of sincerity and individuality. I can see creatives like Christine McConnell and her neo-gothic, sorta-Victorian New York mansion and appreciate what she is doing because it at least feels like she has a genuine interest in retro chic and gothic style. Bernadette Banner too, though her videos are more fashion and beauty-based anyway. But they – and a few others – are the exception. What I have mostly seen has been trend-chasing bandwagon-jumpers who claim to be big fans of Victoriana, Edwardiana, gothic culture and all the rest but feel like fakers. Like the people who jumped onto the burlesque bandwagon in the early 2000s and then jumped straight off it once fashions changed (and perhaps not coincidentally – more than one of the women making these videos has a Paloma Faith vibe about them), or the big fans of easy listening a few years before that, their interest in a scene would seem to be rather transient. There are views to be had and money to be made from turning your room into ‘dark academia’ right now – but we might question, when someone is turning their white and minimalist bedroom into a pseudo-gothic retreat full of gaudy Victorian wallpaper and framed prints of vintage paintings, why their home didn’t already look like this if they were so into the whole vibe?

Fashion is fashion, and for many it will always be an ever-changing desire to stay on trend – whatever that trend might be. If you can make money from it, all the better. I can probably put up with people whose influence for the gothic is Harry Potter rather than Poe – there’s a whole ‘nother old-fart argument to be had about the decline of literary awareness and the death of mainstream horror fiction in favour of YA ‘dark fantasy’ but that isn’t the point here. No, what I find intolerable about the whole Dark Academia trend is the whole bookshelf thing.

If you look at the homes held up as exemplars of the style or the videos telling you how to make your home into a Dark Academic palace, then bookshelves are a big part of it. That makes sense, what with the whole ‘academia’ bit – these rooms are often designed to look like old private libraries. Yay, you might think, a return to people proudly owning physical books. Well, yeah. Except that the rules of Dark Academia are as restrictive as the rules of any other form of interior design, it seems. Just as the fans of the look fret about what to do with their TV, so they are only interested in certain types of books.

If you’ve seen any of our recent videos, you’ll be aware that we have quite extensive bookshelves. In fact, in the room I’m currently sitting in, two complete walls are taken up with bookshelves, all full. We have a lot of books. They are a mix of modern and older, hardback and paperback, with a variety of spine designs. They are as random as you can imagine, much like any other bookshelf owned by book lovers. But not so the books in Dark Academic rooms, where the look is more important than the content. These are all old hardcovers, sans slipcovers, effectively uniform in size and design. Some YouTubers even boast about how they have shelved the books by colour, which is fine in theory but in this case suggests that they are little more than an aesthetic prop. You can buy bundles of old books on eBay that are sold for precisely this purpose – as decor rather than literature. Maybe it is just me, but there seems nothing more despairing than having bookshelves full of anonymous books that you have never – and will never – read, bought because of size and colour rather than content.

The phoney library speaks to the phoniness of the whole Dark Academia trend. It all feels contrived and disposable. I’m all for an aesthetic that moves away from the bland design of the modern home, but Dark Academia feels no more individual than anything you see on those awful interior design TV shows. For me, the perfect home is one that is chaotic and eccentric, a mix of whatever the individual likes and full of stuff – books, DVDs, records, games, toys, whatever wall art floats your boat and everything else that just ends up filling up space. Minimalism feels like a rejection of culture, but so does Dark Academia. Let’s be fair – if you are genuinely into this sort of thing, your home probably already looks like that, just with less studied artfulness. Homes should reflect the people that live in them. Bookshelves should be things of wonder and mystery, not a fashion statement.

There are lots of stupid, intersectional reasons that people criticise Dark Academia in the broader sense (the love of old literature, the emphasis on education, the alleged lack of diversity, the love of art on an aesthetic level – essentially a panicked reaction to the idea that some people might still enjoy the works and culture of the past without considering the other cultural and political influences on those people – and my impression is that this is a very Woke scene rather than one hankering for the days of Imperialism), but few people seem to talk about the inherent shallowness of it all. I suspect that for every person who loves this stuff in a non-ironic way, there will be several who are simply copycats and opportunists. Contrived fashions are the most boring of all fashions because there is no sense of sincerity in it from the start. Cosplaying as Victorian and Edwardian toffs is a curious lifestyle choice unless you are willing to go all in – and for most, it seems to be little more than posturing.

John Waters famously said “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”. Let’s take it a step further – maybe if you go home with someone and they have a wall of hardcover books that are all colour-coded, the same size and clearly just for show, don’t fuck them either.

DAVID FLINT

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