Dormcore: What your student bedroom says about you

Did you have the Betty Blue poster or Athena’s ‘Tennis’ girl? A lava lamp or a single red light bulb? As thousands of students prepare to move out of home and into uni accommodation, Liz Moseley steps into her Adidas Gazelles and looks at ‘dormcore’ through the ages

No matter the decade, posters will always intrigue new university friends – and cover stains (Getty/Shutterstock)

Stand by for traffic chaos this weekend as the parents of half a million lucky youths pack up the Volvo and embark on the annual sobbing ritual of depositing their offspring at university for the first time. The opening of the portal into the university half-life between childhood and grown-upsville is a big moment for any family.

You could argue that higher education is a cipher for the way Britain imagines itself and its future. Universities are microcosms of society, determining what we think is valuable, important and successful – and who gets the chance to feel all or any of those things.

In the same way, the items wedged up against the windows of Dad’s car – moth-eaten childhood mementoes muddled in with shiny new Ikea essentials – tell a story of their time. They are code for the way today’s students imagine themselves and their own future, from the movie-poster nihilism of the late Eighties and early Nineties (Betty Blue, A Clockwork Orange, Withnail and I) to the super-hetero kitsch of the blithely optimistic early Noughties (plastic daisies and “Little Miss” crop tops in the wardrobe) right through to the comfortcore of today’s anxious social justice warriors. Put simply, student dorms provide a surprisingly satisfying slice of social history.