Dark Academe

Abstract

Dark Academe Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) J. K. Rowling has sold more than half a billion Harry Potter novels—and her influence only continues to grow. However, fifteen years after the release of the final installment in her series, its impact is not just measured in the sale and readership of her books worldwide. Or even in viewership of the films or the purchase of trinkets based on them. Rather, her influence now includes the generative role her work has played in dark academe, an aesthetic style that has cast a powerful spell over Gen Z. Although the Age of Bookstores seems like ancient history now that the rise of Amazon and e-books have brought them to the brink of extinction, Rowling’s success was in large part achieved in the twilight years of the brick-and-mortar bookstore. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, bookstores would often organize midnight parties to celebrate the release of new titles in the series. Scholastic, the publisher of the Harry Potter series, would even supply these bookstores with midnight-party event-kits complete with lightning-bolt tattoos. These things were only possible at a time when books were primarily sold from shelves in bookstores—and the thrill of lining up for the release of a new book was on a par with standing in queue at midnight for the release of an album, movie, or concert tickets. It has been said that if all the printed copies of Harry Potter books ever sold were placed end to end, they would go around the equator over sixteen times. In the US alone, Book 4 in the series, which was published in 2000, sold 3 million copies in the first weekend of sales; Book 6, published in 2005, sold 6.9 million copies in the first twenty-four hours; and Book 7, the final book in the series, published in 2007, sold 8.3 million copies on the first day of its release. The initial print run of this last title was a mind-boggling 12 million copies. In the US alone, more than 180 million copies of these children’s books have been sold. So many copies of these books were supplied to big-box bookstores that customers would often be greeted upon entry by a Harry [End Page 1] Potter book monster: a huge stack of these books on display which was impossible to miss when one first entered the store. In 2016 it was estimated that 37 percent of children in the US at the time had read a Harry Potter book, and that almost 50 percent of children aged fifteen to seventeen had read one. Moreover, it has often been said that Harry Potter has increased literacy among children. For example, one survey of parents resulted in 85 percent of them stating that reading these books led their child to want to read more frequently, and 76 percent said that reading Harry Potter books helped them in school. But what studies do not show is the connection between reading Harry Potter books and the explosion today of what has come to be known as dark academe—an aesthetic that is often linked back to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. ________ Dark academe is huge on social media today. At this writing, #darkacademia has 5,100 videos on YouTube, 1.4 million posts on Instagram, and almost 2 billion views on TikTok. In addition, Google reports that searches for “Dark Academia” have increased 4,750 percent between the start of the pandemic and the spring of 2021. According to the first-ever Instagram Trend Report, which bills itself as a “guide to the upcoming next-gen trends defined by Gen-Z that will shape culture in the next year,” 50 percent of teens and young adults in 2022 are going to be trying “Dark Academia” as a “bold fashion.” Describing it as a form of “maximalist fashion” and “alt-fashion,” the survey contends that dark-academia fashion will reach its peak this year. In contrast to “athleisure fashion,” a hybrid of athletic wear and leisure wear worn in the gym, workplace, and other settings, dark academia as...