Dark Academia 2 - the conversation continues..

[highlandcoo]

Hello again to everyone from the last thread and welcome to anyone who enjoys talking about this aesthetic .. and if you have photos to share even better!

We've been discussing woollen jumpers, tweed skirts and jackets (with and without elbow patches), flannel trousers, fair isle tank tops, leather boots, culottes, berets and many other appealing garments, and more recently novels, poetry, libraries in general and even home decor with a DA vibe. Plus tortoiseshell spectacles and lorgnettes. I don't think we've touched on DA hairstyles yet although I've been giving that some thought ..

A DA quote I came across the other day: "I declare after all, there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library." (P&P of course)

If curling up in a wing-backed armchair in front of a log fire, with candles flickering, sipping tea from a china mug while reading your Jane Austen or Bronte novel sounds appealing, this thread might be for you. Or if you just like the clothes - that works too.

Our first thread below:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/style_and_beauty/4861009-dark-academia-anyone-who-loves-this-style?page=39&reply=129785046

Bastard indeed; how can people so misread things?
A few years ago, I was strolling along the cliffs, wearing a vintage, genuine panama, with a linen shirt and trousers, and a bastard kept calling me Crocodile Dundee! Repeatedly. I looked far more George Emerson.............
I think...it was just because I was wearing a hat.

Alan Garner fan (and indeed old book fan) here. 👍🏼⭐️

Wha....?

I've just found it on Oxfam for £6.99. The blue cover is a first edition paperback (I know because I bought it when it first came out). There are some red cover hardbacks, including at Abebooks.
https://onlineshop.oxfam.org.uk/the-book-of-prefaces-a-short-history-of-literate-thought-in-words-by-great-writers-of-four-nations/product/HD_301086670

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31516200711&

Also – on a roll here – The Humument is another cracker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Humument

Saw the new edition in a bookshop window on Charing Cross Road, rushed in and brought two, as was sure would find someone to whom to give it. I hotfooted out of the shop excitedly leafing through... and nearly barrelled into Stephen Fry. He sidestepped adroitly and we both did the "Oh I do beg your pardon".

I so wish this story ended with me running after him and pressing the spare copy into his hands. But as I watched his departing back my courage failed. I took it back to my office – where my colleague seized it from my hands like manna. So all's well, etc.

(Me writing down all the various locations, clothing shops, books, etc. mentioned in thread)

Abe books is a good site for second hand books.

I hope you gave that Philistine a withering stare? Your beautiful coat brings to mind a stunning, black velvet coat dress from Laura Ashley that I wore everywhere back in the Nineties. It was full length, proper silk velvet (which you rarely see today) with black satin cuffs and revere collar. DD 'borrowed' it and lent it to a friend for trick or treating when she was in Yr 6. Said dress was never seen again!

Another quote, apt, I think. 'Besides, I seemed to hold two lives-the life of thought, and that of reality'. Villette.
I can't remember who asked about longline cardigans,and their scarcity......see this beauty on ebay.
Howell is usually a little boxy, but this isn't.

Now I think about, probably also in my bag on that occasion was A Vindication of the Rights of Women. So it was a very DA moment.

I've just come upon this thread and am reading it with a good degree of nostalgia. In some senses it's reminiscent of my own undergraduate days (I'm a graduate and now lecturer in literature). It's all very Philip Pullman.

I find myself wishing 'if only this went beyond an aesthetic', because it bears little resemblance to the academia of today. The cutthroat, business-orientated, grindingly exploitative universities of our times were not what my generation signed up to at all when we embarked on our doctoral study with such enthusiasm. Research is dying on the vine in favour of increased teaching hours, funding in the humanities is drying up unless it's centred around the digital humanities, sustainability or gender, and taught content is giving way to spoonfeeding the study skills I had to learn of my own volition.

Hence neoliberalism's robbed us of our academia, and ironically this is darker than DA could ever be. Check out The “Dark Academia” Subculture Offers a Fantasy Alternative to the Neoliberal University (jacobin.com)

But I defy you to read Peter Fleming's 'Dark Academia: How Unviersities Die'. Thorougly depressed me! (Incidentally 'I Capture the Castle' is a bloody great, escapist read: anyone seen the movie?) Another favourite of mine is Evelyn Waugh's 'Vile Bodies' (and Stephen Fry's film version 'Bright Young Things' is pretty good too). Also, if Christie and golden-age detective fiction is your thing, Ethel Lina White is making something of a comeback and her books are wonderful: light, witty, funny but very intertextual and 'academic' at the same time.

Sadly my 'aesthetic' is very thrown together and I likely resemble an ageing hippy more than I do an old Oxonian. All the same I'd love to join you: almost as a way of pretending things are not quite the way they are. If it improves my cred I have a great study-cum-library with floor to ceiling bookshelves and my very own globe on my desk ...

Oh I know, @SerafinasGoose . We're cosplaying at academia, not having to deal with the real, grinding mess.

Ooh, everyone round to @SerafinasGoose to gawp at her study. 😍

Having a parent in that field, I definitely do not want the real, current academia vibe. In the meantime, we welcome you in for a bit of fantasy and respite!

Well I'm happy to chuck it in the bin and keep my gripes for the 'UCU have bollocksed it all up' threads!

Digital libraries, grrr (muttering expletives under my breath ...)

@SerafinasGoose Absolutely the modern experience of academia does not align with what we would want it to be. But you are very welcome to our nostalgic, sepia-tinted (not rose!) fantasy of it.

I am on the hunt for a knit vest...
V neck, black or fair isle and cotton (or even acrylic) rather than wool. That doesn't sound like a tall order, does it?! And yet I cannot find one at all. One at M&S but it turned out to be navy...

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+chair+netflix&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari

running in and out today but The Chair was a really great Netflix series about modern academia and the politics.

Thanks @helenahandcart78 . I shall add it to my small-but-growing shawl collection and may I offer you a blanket in one or other shade of red, in return?

I quite like summer @Bookist but the heat in its extremes isn't good, I agree.

Ooh a globe, @SerafinasGoose ! I need a globe, I never know where anything is.

Thanks @IndianSummer78! Applying the now established formula n+1, you can never have too many blankets.

@SerafinasGoose, I'm not in the academic world but I can relate. I am a litigation solicitor so have to be all hard-nosed, cynical and cut-throat in my day-job. This thread is like a warm bath of cosiness and nostalgia by comparison!

@SerafinasGoose I could wax lyrical with you all day long about the death of academia (as we used to know it). I will order the Fleming book, and hope it will further fuel the fire in my belly to counteract the extinction of the liberal arts. While I'm not a university affiliated academic, I do try to play some small part from my isolated little corner of the world in a particularly niche area.

On a more positive note, while today's excursion around the charity shops drew no suitably DA clothing, I did manage to pick up a hardback first edition of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - for a pound! It had to go in my bag of course, despite already owning the paperback, Kindle and audiobook editions. Opinions may differ as to whether JS&Mr.N is actually "dark academia", but for me it is a classic, with the extensive footnotes, illustrations and luscious narrative style.

For those averse to fantasy, in DA lit, I would highly recommend If We Were Villains by ML Rio. My guilty pleasure is listening to Ian Carmichael narrate the Peter Whimsey stories, although I am partial to a bit of Christie. Does anyone else enjoy the new Poirot films?

Well more or less, barring the draughts as my castle (why not) has good double glazed windows. But they aren't wolfhounds, they're gryphons named Beatrice and Muriel, and I suspect they're shapeshifters because every once in a while I look up and they've morphed into two determined-looking women in their prime, wearing tweed skirts with their hair pulled back rather severely. One has spectacles and a filigree and pearl brooch, and the other has a monocle and a cameo, and they're always either reading something or writing with black fountain pens in little vintage notebooks. They look rather serious and I'm not sure what they're up to but I assume some sort of magic.

.

I stopped working in higher education nearly twenty years ago, but the rot had already set in. The only way I'd go back is if I had a time machine and could travel back circa 1955.

In other news, my outfit today is very much Urban DA, I feel? Charcoal grey, cable knit sweater, black straight leg jeans and taupe, Birkie Boston clogs (no socks). Still loving my claret red gel polish too.

I’m also an academic but sadly you can’t come and gawp at my study as we all hotdesk now and not allowed to keep anything in our office apart from one drawer and one bookshelf!

My husband is an academic and still has own office with random paper everywhere. All the professional services at his uni hot desk but academics still do their own thing. It isn't an easy job at all though and requires and awful lot of self discipline which I don't have.

Vinted purchases. The shoes are a bit big but ai might be able to get them to work, I want them to so badly!

And YYY to glorious Edinburgh.

I've just been watching a very dark Rebus adaptation with John Hannah. It opens in Mary King's Close, and (for some entirely unexplained reason) through Rebus's dreams repeatedly runs a black horse and carriage, lamps lit and harness jangling.

This was most distracting, because every single time it made me think of Mary Dudgeon eloping in 1726. Mary was an orphan who lived with her married cousin Jean Moubray or Cant in Inverkeithing, and in April 1726 she eloped across the Firth of Forth – the day before her 12th birthday.

“The 11th instant Miss Dudgeon was run away with by one Maclain a middle aged man, who its said is a Gentleman of a small ffortune near Inverness—her maid was in the plot—they went from Jo Cant’s house in a yoal at 12 that night and landed at the Murrays. You may imagine the sputter Jo Cant would be in next morning missing her—he offered 100 guineas to any who would find her, he sent to all airths—he went himself with Cockairnie’s son to Edinr and to make a long tale short she was catched at Corstorphing in a Hogny [probably hackey] coach designed to carry her westward and was to be marryed next night for she was 12 years old the 12th instant; so that till that day was at an end, it was not a legal marryadge. They lett Maclain goe and carried the Girle and her maid to Robt. Moubray’s house in Edinr. . . . . . . . I hear she is immediately to be marryed to Cockairnie’s eldest son.”
[Contemporary letter from the Countess of Moray.]

Mary lived to the age of 80 and had 12 children with "Cockairnie's eldest son".

Her grandchildren were extraordinary: one was this Robert Moubray: https://tottenham-summerhillroad.com/moubray_family_fife_tottenham.links.html
Another I suspect of being, at least partially, a model for Captain Jack Aubrey. And a third married James Stuart of Dunearn, who accidently killed Sir Alexander Boswell (son of diarist Boswell) in a duel while trying to miss.

At least that's what Stuart said in court, and everyone pretended to believe him.