Lily AI’s Fashion Product Taxonomy: What is Dark Academia?

With its preppy style and intellectual focus, Dark Academia, the popular TikTok aesthetic, is one of the darkest trends at the moment in fashion. All about idealizing the experience of learning and chalk-covered blackboards, this style is classic, minimalist, and edgy.

From perfectly groomed peacoats, to gloomy hues (and skies) and angst-ridden vibes, this goth-adjacent look is moody, polished, and unmistakably dark.

What is Dark Academia?

Just in time for winter and its moodier characteristics, Dark Academia is the popular Wednesday Addams-inspired trend of the season. With a love for tweed blazers and plaid, this literary look has jumped off the page and landed in closets everywhere.

The Dark Academia trend romanticizes all things intellectual and draws inspiration from the classic Greek arts, writing, and architecture fused with gothic elements. Hallowed, yet idyllic, this trend combines smarts with a sullen style. Think of a long dark stone corridor within the Hogwarts castle of the Harry Potter films. Or, a dimly lit library filled with fashionable students in dark-colored uniforms wearing wire-rimmed glasses. Overall, a wardrobe channeling the Dark Academia aesthetic should be put-together and preppy, with a clear emphasis on its signature darker color palette.

In many ways, Dark Academia is similar to Gothcore as both of their aesthetics center around moody and dark elements. But while gothcore draws much of its inspiration from music culture in the metal/rock/punk genres, Dark Academia fashion is rooted in art and is much more vintage ivy league, as opposed to vampy. It’s prep school fashion with a gothic twist.

Dark Academia’s Fashion Product Attributes

Dark Academia characterizes itself through its dark, angsty vibe and focus on dark colors, neutrals, and earthy tones. Some of these revolving colors in this palette include black, dark green, gray, burgundy, navy, tan, white, and cream. There is not a wide variety of prints used in Dark Academia looks, but plaid, argyle, and stripes are quite commonly utilized.

Although the color palette isn’t very expansive, the Dark Academia style is rich with texture and fluid enough to allow the mixture of different textures in order to add interest and depth to more seemingly “neutral” outfits.

Materials often associated with this style are wool, cashmere, leather, knit, velvet, tweed, tartan, corduroy, and crepe. Because of the mix of materials, layering seems to be a huge part of achieving the style. While embellishments include pleats, piping, belts, and even berets. Plus, a book or journal tucked under one’s arm, of course.

Lily AI’s Fashion Product Taxonomy

To capture the noteworthy dress code of the Dark Academia aesthetic, Lily AI’s fashion product taxonomy has many different attributes that can be used to capture this trend effectively.

For instance, with our ability to highlight and focus on color, especially with the key role it plays in this trend, Lily AI has grown our taxonomy to grasp and expand upon the many variations of dark colors utilized. Beyond just tagging all your gray products as Dark Academia, Lily AI works to keep all the different shades involved tagged accurately and promptly. That way a shopper is still going to find the Dark Academia items they’re looking for, whether they refer to them as “dark gray,” “light gray,” “slate gray,” or some other variation. Additionally, because this trend layers materials and takes a liking to embellishments, our robust embellishment taxonomy is the perfect study partner and can tag the all latest relevant products – no matter if they’re covered in cashmere or corduroy.

Lily AI’s robust fashion product taxonomy takes into account how real people actually search for items in the real world and can see and tag the differences in high definition. Our trend identification team of domain experts are not only committed to researching short-term and long-term trends, they also identify the relevant tags that embody each of those styles. They then collaborate with the AI-powered automation side to pull and highlight the specific attributes that resonate with each trend.

Our team continues to evolve Lily’s fashion product taxonomy every day so that Lily AI customers will always receive the latest product attributes associated with trends like Dark Academia and more.