When taking stock of their rush outfits, the sorority hopefuls on the College of Alabama usually get slowed down within the jewellery. Garments for the week-long August ritual colloquially generally known as Bama Rush are usually easy: Think about the sort of cute little sleeveless costume {that a} high-school cheerleader may put on to her older cousin’s outside wedding ceremony, and also you’re heading in the right direction. In case you needed to spend all day traipsing up and down Tuscaloosa’s sorority row within the stifling late-summer warmth, you too would in all probability throw in your most diaphanous sundress and wedge-heeled sandals and name it a day. The jewellery, by comparability, piles up—stacks of principally 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 thousands and thousands. These missives steadily take the type of a long-standing web staple: the outfit-of-the-day submit, or OOTD. Of their movies, the women supply an replace on the secretive rush course of, plus an exhaustive—or, because the week wears on, exhausted—accounting of the whole lot they’ve placed on their our bodies for the day forward, typically 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 Individuals, 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 common).
To these with out a lot curiosity in trend, the lists can sound like gibberish. One RushTok star needed to make clear to viewers that when she mentioned 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 worth ranges; hear intently, and also you’ll hear about Hermès bangles on the identical wrists as these from Amazon. Bama Rush might appeal to an enormous viewers as a result of it affords a behind-the-scenes glimpse at an intensely cloistered world, however these outfit inventories are fascinating for the alternative purpose: They’re a point-by-point lesson in how America retailers.
At first blush, it will be truthful to assume that the habits of these partaking in Bama Rush don’t have a lot to inform us about broader traits—in consumerism, or in anything. At UA, rush contributors 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 virtually 90 p.c white, although white folks make up about two-thirds of the state’s total inhabitants. The College of Alabama’s admissions stats present a choice for rich college students that isn’t a lot totally different from that of the Ivy League, and knowledge obtainable counsel that college students from wealthier backgrounds usually tend to pursue Greek membership.
Nevertheless it’s exactly this demographic narrowness that makes potential new sorority members—PNMs, in Greek jargon—a helpful case research in status-seeking, and subsequently in trendy consumerism. In cases of maximum privilege, broad purchasing traits have historically not been all that arduous 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. Partially, sorority recruitment at colleges like Alabama formalizes this course of based on every campus’s chapter hierarchies. On the prime of the sorority heap, you’ll often discover homes filled with essentially the most conventionally engaging women 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 offer you a dream internship or write you a very compelling advice letter to your first-choice regulation college—are usually not misplaced on these younger ladies, even when additionally 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 virtually all school college students, however Greek life offers it construction.
As is the case with any sort of high-status group, one of the best ways to realize entry is often to display 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 a degree of emphasis amongst PNMs, and why they’ve primacy on RushTok. Once you’re getting comparatively temporary 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 lots 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 needed 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, nevertheless, the RushTokers simply as cheerfully admit to sporting unbranded Amazon junk and a number of the most cost-effective 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. Customers have lengthy existed in additional predictable worth strata and shops, which needed to take care of the limiting realities of geography and actual property whereas serving shopper bases that had been pretty properly outlined. There was little purpose for a wealthy particular person to browse racks of garments supposed for these of extra modest means. There have been exceptions, however they had been broadly 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 turned a milestone in trend historical past. On the time, sporting excessive trend with a mass-market mall model (which wasn’t even that low cost!) was unthinkable, and significantly so in a second of intense trend scrutiny.
The dual forces of on-line purchasing and garment-industry deregulation modified that. The web has brought about a sort of consumer-context collapse: You’re now not in search of out merchandise to judge and selecting which institutions you enter. As an alternative, these merchandise are pursuing your consideration, often unbidden by way of focused advertisements on-line and particularly on social media. The mechanics of spending $10 or $1,000 by way of your cellphone really feel largely similar. 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. In case you come throughout a cute $20 costume, of which there at the moment are hundreds obtainable on-line, why not attempt it? Not even moments of intense, specific status-seeking comparable to sorority rush can blunt the attract of quick trend, 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 identified 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 perfect of the whole lot have a tendency to finish up sporting an Amazon exercise set {that a} buddy on their high-school monitor staff swore by, or some jewellery from H&M to make their layers of actual gold necklaces and bracelets look a little bit extra strong. By the identical measure, luxurious items have turn into way more aggressively marketed to middle- and working-class folks up to now a number of a long time, which has helped luxurious conglomerates increase 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 comparable than they ever have earlier than. As soon as everybody has agreed that it’s nice to faux it a little bit bit, refusing to play alongside finally simply makes you appear to be a try-hard or a snob. The norms and expectations it’s a must to reside as much as have shifted. Make no mistake, although. You’re nonetheless making an attempt very, very laborious.
