What Bama Rush Reveals About How America Shops

Jul 29, 2023

Here’s my cute $20 Shein dress. And here are all of my $400 David Yurman bracelets.

When taking inventory of their rush outfits, the sorority hopefuls at the University of Alabama typically get bogged down in the jewelry. Clothes for the week-long August ritual colloquially known as Bama Rush tend to be simple: Imagine the kind of cute little sleeveless dress that a high-school cheerleader might wear to her older cousin’s outdoor wedding, and you’re on the right track. If you had to spend all day traipsing up and down Tuscaloosa’s sorority row in the stifling late-summer heat, you too would probably throw on your most diaphanous sundress and wedge-heeled sandals and call it a day. The jewelry, by comparison, piles up—stacks of mostly golden rings and bracelets, layers of delicate chain necklaces, a pair of statement earrings to match every flippy miniskirt.

On #BamaRushTok, the informal TikTok event that has coincided with actual sorority recruitment at UA since 2021, a subset of the roughly 2,500 prospective sisters documents the experience in real time for an audience of millions. These missives frequently take the form of a long-standing internet staple: the outfit-of-the-day post, or OOTD. In their videos, the girls offer an update on the secretive rush process, plus an exhaustive—or, as the week wears on, exhausted—accounting of everything they’ve put on their bodies for the day ahead, sometimes including details as small as hair accessories or as invisible as perfume. The result is a rapid-fire onslaught of brand names local and global: Kendra Scott, Free People, the Pants Store, Cartier, Target, David Yurman, Enewton, Louis Vuitton, Shein, Francesca’s, Dior, Lululemon (not to be confused with Lulu’s, which is also popular).

To those without much interest in fashion, the lists can sound like gibberish. One RushTok star had to clarify to viewers that when she said that her shoes or bracelets were from Colombia, she meant the country of her mother’s birth and not a boutique they’d never heard of. Most of the outfits are a mishmash of brands at wildly disparate price levels; listen closely, and you’ll hear about Hermès bangles on the same wrists as those from Amazon. Bama Rush may attract a huge audience because it offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at an intensely cloistered world, but these outfit inventories are fascinating for the opposite reason: They’re a point-by-point lesson in how America shops.

Read: There’s no secret to how wealthy people dress

At first blush, it would be fair to think that the habits of those partaking in Bama Rush don’t have much to tell us about broader trends—in consumerism, or in anything else. At UA, rush participants come from a very narrow demographic. They’re overwhelmingly thin, well-tanned, conventionally attractive teenagers. A startlingly high proportion of them are blond. (Startling even for me, having spent a semester as a Delta Gamma at the University of Georgia in the mid-2000s.) Panhellenic sororities long resisted integration and are still by any measure white organizations, especially in the Deep South; in 2021, Alabama’s rush class was almost 90 percent white, even though white people make up about two-thirds of the state’s overall population. The University of Alabama’s admissions stats show a preference for wealthy students that isn’t much different from that of the Ivy League, and data available suggest that students from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to pursue Greek membership.

But it’s precisely this demographic narrowness that makes potential new sorority members—PNMs, in Greek jargon—a useful case study in status-seeking, and therefore in modern consumerism. In instances of extreme privilege, broad shopping trends have traditionally not been all that hard to parse: Rich people buy nice things, and a shared understanding of those possessions helps them identify one another as members of the same exclusive class. In part, sorority recruitment at schools like Alabama formalizes this process according to each campus’s chapter hierarchies. At the top of the sorority heap, you’ll usually find houses full of the most conventionally attractive girls from wealthy, socially prominent families. The potential upsides of an invitation to a good sorority—one in which your sisters’ parents have the power to give you a dream internship or write you a particularly compelling recommendation letter to your first-choice law school—are not lost on these young women, even if they also very much want to forge real friendships, meet cute frat boys, and find a sense of belonging. This mixture of ambitions would be identifiable in almost all college students, but Greek life gives it structure.

As is the case with any type of high-status group, the best way to gain entry is usually to demonstrate that you already belong—in this case, that you understand the norms and expectations that knit the group together. That’s why rush outfits have long been a point of emphasis among PNMs, and why they have primacy on RushTok. When you’re getting relatively brief periods of face time to make your case for joining a socially and economically elite group, your clothing and appearance really matter. A head full of obviously unnatural but perfectly toned bright-blond hair, for example, costs hundreds of dollars a month to maintain. Its presence suggests both a fluency with the group’s aesthetic standards and access to the economic resources necessary to adhere to them at all times. So, too, do $600 Golden Goose sneakers and a wrist full of $400 David Yurman bracelets (stacked with one $7,350 Cartier Love bracelet, if your parents really want to let the world know they’ve raised a queen bee).

Read: Fashion has abandoned human taste

Now, however, the RushTokers just as cheerfully admit to wearing unbranded Amazon junk and some of the cheapest apparel on Earth. For much of mass-market-fashion history, the very highest- and lowest-end products would have made strange bedfellows in a single outfit. Consumers have long existed in more predictable price strata and stores, which had to contend with the limiting realities of geography and real estate while serving consumer bases that were fairly well defined. There was little reason for a rich person to browse racks of clothes intended for those of more modest means. There were exceptions, but they were widely regarded as eccentric or daring; Sharon Stone’s pairing of a crisp, white Gap button-down and a Vera Wang skirt at the 1998 Oscars immediately became a milestone in fashion history. At the time, wearing high fashion with a mass-market mall brand (which wasn’t even that cheap!) was unthinkable, and particularly so in a moment of intense fashion scrutiny.

The twin forces of online shopping and garment-industry deregulation changed that. The internet has caused a kind of consumer-context collapse: You’re no longer seeking out products to evaluate and choosing which establishments you enter. Instead, those products are pursuing your attention, usually unbidden through targeted ads online and especially on social media. The mechanics of spending $10 or $1,000 through your phone feel largely identical. While Americans have been getting used to this new system, the domestic clothing market has been flooded with cheap clothes from overseas factories in volumes that would have been illegal to import a few decades ago. If you come across a cute $20 dress, of which there are now thousands available online, why not try it? Not even moments of intense, explicit status-seeking such as sorority rush can blunt the allure of fast fashion, regardless of the habit’s obvious wastefulness or the buyers’ financial wherewithal.

Cheap clothes’ omnipresence has come to feel normal to many people, and especially to those who are young enough to have known no previous reality. Under those circumstances, even the people who can afford (or, often in the case of Bama Rush, whose parents can afford) the best of everything tend to end up wearing an Amazon workout set that a friend on their high-school track team swore by, or some jewelry from H&M to make their layers of real gold necklaces and bracelets look a little more robust. By the same measure, luxury goods have become much more aggressively marketed to middle- and working-class people in the past several decades, which has helped luxury conglomerates expand their sales to a far larger market. Rich people trade down in search of quantity and ease, less rich people trade up in search of status and quality, and everyone’s buying habits start to look more similar than they ever have before. Once everyone has agreed that it’s fine to fake it a little bit, refusing to play along eventually just makes you look like a try-hard or a snob. The norms and expectations you have to live up to have shifted. Make no mistake, though. You’re still trying very, very hard.