When taking stock of their rush outfits, the sorority hopefuls on the College of Alabama sometimes get slowed down within the jewellery. Garments for the week-long August ritual colloquially referred to as Bama Rush are typically easy: Think about the sort of cute little sleeveless costume {that a} high-school cheerleader may put on to her older cousin’s out of doors marriage ceremony, and also you’re heading in the right direction. For those who needed to spend all day traipsing up and down Tuscaloosa’s sorority row within the stifling late-summer warmth, you too would most likely throw in your most diaphanous sundress and wedge-heeled sandals and name it a day. The jewellery, by comparability, piles up—stacks of largely golden rings and bracelets, layers of delicate chain necklaces, a pair of assertion earrings to match each flippy miniskirt.
On #BamaRushTok, the casual TikTok occasion that has coincided with precise sorority recruitment at UA since 2021, a subset of the roughly 2,500 potential sisters paperwork the expertise in actual time for an viewers of hundreds of thousands. These missives regularly take the type of a long-standing web staple: the outfit-of-the-day submit, or OOTD. Of their movies, the ladies supply an replace on the secretive rush course of, plus an exhaustive—or, because the week wears on, exhausted—accounting of all the things they’ve placed on their our bodies for the day forward, generally together with particulars as small as hair equipment or as invisible as fragrance. The result’s a rapid-fire onslaught of brand name names native and world: Kendra Scott, Free Folks, the Pants Retailer, Cartier, Goal, David Yurman, Enewton, Louis Vuitton, Shein, Francesca’s, Dior, Lululemon (to not be confused with Lulu’s, which can be well-liked).
To these with out a lot curiosity in style, the lists can sound like gibberish. One RushTok star needed to make clear to viewers that when she stated that her sneakers or bracelets had been from Colombia, she meant the nation of her mom’s beginning and never a boutique they’d by no means heard of. A lot of the outfits are a mishmash of manufacturers at wildly disparate value ranges; hear carefully, and also you’ll hear about Hermès bangles on the identical wrists as these from Amazon. Bama Rush could appeal to an enormous viewers as a result of it gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse at an intensely cloistered world, however these outfit inventories are fascinating for the other motive: They’re a point-by-point lesson in how America outlets.
At first blush, it might be honest to suppose that the habits of these partaking in Bama Rush don’t have a lot to inform us about broader developments—in consumerism, or in the rest. At UA, rush members come from a really slim demographic. They’re overwhelmingly skinny, well-tanned, conventionally engaging youngsters. A startlingly excessive proportion of them are blond. (Startling even for me, having spent a semester as a Delta Gamma on the College of Georgia within the mid-2000s.) Panhellenic sororities lengthy resisted integration and are nonetheless by any measure white organizations, particularly within the Deep South; in 2021, Alabama’s rush class was nearly 90 % white, although white folks make up about two-thirds of the state’s general inhabitants. The College of Alabama’s admissions stats present a desire for rich college students that isn’t a lot totally different from that of the Ivy League, and knowledge accessible counsel that college students from wealthier backgrounds usually tend to pursue Greek membership.
However it’s exactly this demographic narrowness that makes potential new sorority members—PNMs, in Greek jargon—a helpful case examine in status-seeking, and subsequently in trendy consumerism. In cases of maximum privilege, broad purchasing developments have historically not been all that tough to parse: Wealthy folks purchase good issues, and a shared understanding of these possessions helps them determine each other as members of the identical unique class. Partly, sorority recruitment at faculties like Alabama formalizes this course of based on every campus’s chapter hierarchies. On the high of the sorority heap, you’ll often discover homes filled with probably the most conventionally engaging ladies from rich, socially outstanding households. The potential upsides of an invite to a good sorority—one wherein your sisters’ mother and father have the ability to provide you a dream internship or write you a very compelling advice letter to your first-choice legislation college—usually are not misplaced on these younger ladies, even when in addition they very a lot need to forge actual friendships, meet cute frat boys, and discover a sense of belonging. This combination of ambitions could be identifiable in nearly all school college students, however Greek life provides it construction.
As is the case with any kind of high-status group, the easiest way to achieve entry is often to exhibit that you just already belong—on this case, that you just perceive the norms and expectations that knit the group collectively. That’s why rush outfits have lengthy been some extent of emphasis amongst PNMs, and why they’ve primacy on RushTok. If you’re getting comparatively transient intervals of face time to make your case for becoming a member of a socially and economically elite group, your clothes and look actually matter. A head filled with clearly unnatural however completely toned bright-blond hair, for instance, prices tons of of {dollars} a month to keep up. Its presence suggests each a fluency with the group’s aesthetic requirements and entry to the financial sources crucial to stick to them always. So, too, do $600 Golden Goose sneakers and a wrist filled with $400 David Yurman bracelets (stacked with one $7,350 Cartier Love bracelet, in case your mother and father actually need to let the world know they’ve raised a queen bee).
Now, nonetheless, the RushTokers simply as cheerfully admit to sporting unbranded Amazon junk and a few of the least expensive attire on Earth. For a lot of mass-market-fashion historical past, the very highest- and lowest-end merchandise would have made unusual bedfellows in a single outfit. Shoppers have lengthy existed in additional predictable value strata and shops, which needed to cope with the limiting realities of geography and actual property whereas serving shopper bases that had been pretty properly outlined. There was little motive for a wealthy individual to browse racks of garments meant for these of extra modest means. There have been exceptions, however they had been extensively considered eccentric or daring; Sharon Stone’s pairing of a crisp, white Hole button-down and a Vera Wang skirt on the 1998 Oscars instantly grew to become a milestone in style historical past. On the time, sporting excessive style with a mass-market mall model (which wasn’t even that low cost!) was unthinkable, and notably so in a second of intense style scrutiny.
The dual forces of on-line purchasing and garment-industry deregulation modified that. The web has precipitated a sort of consumer-context collapse: You’re not searching for out merchandise to judge and selecting which institutions you enter. As an alternative, these merchandise are pursuing your consideration, often unbidden via focused adverts on-line and particularly on social media. The mechanics of spending $10 or $1,000 via your cellphone really feel largely an identical. Whereas Individuals have been getting used to this new system, the home clothes market has been flooded with low cost garments from abroad factories in volumes that may have been unlawful to import just a few a long time in the past. For those who come throughout a cute $20 costume, of which there at the moment are 1000’s accessible on-line, why not attempt it? Not even moments of intense, specific status-seeking akin to sorority rush can blunt the attract of quick style, whatever the behavior’s apparent wastefulness or the patrons’ monetary wherewithal.
Low cost garments’ omnipresence has come to really feel regular to many individuals, and particularly to those that are younger sufficient to have recognized no earlier actuality. Beneath these circumstances, even the individuals who can afford (or, usually within the case of Bama Rush, whose mother and father can afford) the very best of all the things have a tendency to finish up sporting an Amazon exercise set {that a} good friend on their high-school monitor group swore by, or some jewellery from H&M to make their layers of actual gold necklaces and bracelets look somewhat extra sturdy. By the identical measure, luxurious items have change into far more aggressively marketed to middle- and working-class folks previously a number of a long time, which has helped luxurious conglomerates broaden their gross sales to a far bigger market. Wealthy folks commerce down seeking amount and ease, much less wealthy folks commerce up seeking standing and high quality, and everybody’s shopping for habits begin to look extra related than they ever have earlier than. As soon as everybody has agreed that it’s high quality to pretend it somewhat bit, refusing to play alongside finally simply makes you appear like a try-hard or a snob. The norms and expectations you must reside as much as have shifted. Make no mistake, although. You’re nonetheless making an attempt very, very laborious.
