CNN –
Our nationwide fascination with #BamaRush started with OOTDs.
These are outfits of the day for the uninitiated. Every day of sorority recruitment at the University of Alabama in 2021, college women flaunted their Gray Goose sneakers, baggy pants store shorts and Kendra Scott charms. There were chunky wedges, frilly dresses, and Lululemon shorts to “run home” in; There were the funny glitches and heartbreaking rejections. And we, the audience, were there until the prospective Southern sorority became sisters (although some never made it to Bid Day).
#BamaRush exploded in popularity in August 2021 and again in 2022 – the hashtag has been viewed more than 2.6 billion times on TikTok. Suddenly, millions of eyes were on this previously mysterious ritual, which despite being accessed by TikTok, still remains shrouded in mystery. And through their very special clothes we got our first impression of life in a sorority in the south.
The documentary “Bama Rush,” which premieres Tuesday on Max (formerly HBO Max), aims to demystify the simultaneously bubbly and heartbreaking recruitment we’ve witnessed vicariously on TikTok. (Like CNN, Max is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
The dress code for student unions is oddly conformist. Recruit outfits often convey personality, privilege, and etiquette, among other qualities sororities value. It’s the clothes that drew us to #RushTok, and they’re also tools that rushees use to impress an unknown group of young women with enviable social capital. And sororities often use them to maintain the status quo.
Jill Frank/The New York Times/Redux
A potential new member walks through the University of Alabama’s sorority row during recruitment week in 2022.
The conformist elements of sorority life can be tempting at first: Stephanie Talmadge wrote for Racked in 2017 that “fraternities and sororities provide a quick fix to the question ‘Who am I?’ offer.” Riddle. At the start of your freshman year, hurry up and get a brand new label before you even set foot in a classroom.”
The young women in Bama Rush share similar reasons for wanting to join a sorority—sisterhood, belonging, a heightened sense of self. Carefully selecting clothes that demonstrate a desire to be accepted is only part of the process of joining a family of four.
And at the University of Alabama, Greek life is extremely popular – around 36% of all students, or 12,000 people, belong to one of the school’s 69 Greek organizations.
There is an emphasis on equality in recruitment: at a huge southern public university like Bama, fraternity members may wear matching t-shirts and skirts in the first round and change into outfits from the same color palette as recruitment progresses.
For prospective new members or PNMs, the University of Alabama Panhellenic Association also produces guides on what to wear to each round so that they fit in with the rest of their rush group. These guides often don’t tell PNMs to avoid exposing their abs or wearing thin spaghetti straps, but current sorority members often do so in detailed videos on the ins and outs of sorority recruitment on TikTok and YouTube.
A Bama graduate who rushed told The Cut in 2021 that while these recruiting attire guides weren’t “prescriptive” if PNMs “don’t look like they’re supposed to (like if you’re in a T- shirt appear). instead of a dress), people will say, ‘She’s weird.'”
Trisha Addicks, a sorority recruitment coach who appears in “Bama Rush,” says the key to the perfect Rush look is “to blend in without being crazy standout.”
“You don’t have to be like everyone else … not trying to follow the crowd or the trend, but at the same time fit into a certain kind of rush,” Addicks says in the documentary, in which she follows a sorority with multiple hopes for business to find a suitable recruiting dress. “You don’t want to give a sorority reason to circumcise you.”
Jill Frank/The New York Times/Redux
A student displays her bracelet during recruitment at the University of Alabama in 2022.
So why the emphasis on clothing? Historically, according to studies and interviews with sorority members in the 20th and 21st centuries, sororities have chosen deposit classes to rise in the Greek ranking system or to maintain their place based on the physical attractiveness of its members. (Active University of Alabama fraternity members told Rachel Fleit, director of “Bama Rush,” that the tier system, regardless of whether they believed in its merits, was decided by fraternity men.)
According to researchers Simone Ispa-Landa and Barbara J. Risman, “the open mutual assessment of male consent” was a “key theme” among fraternity members participating in studies from the mid-’70s and early ’70s during the 1970s and early 1980s the presence. They wrote then, as now: “A woman’s appearance and perceived sociality remain critical to acceptance into a sorority.”
Michelle Lepianka Carter/The Tuscaloosa News/AP
Potential new sorority members join the University of Alabama’s recruitment in 2012, a full decade before Bama Rush was filmed.
Ispa-Landa, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, also interviewed members of a student union at an unnamed, highly selective college. There, members “looked down” on the Southern sororities, she said in a phone interview.
But these Greek organizations also value dress and style in the recruitment process, Ispa-Landa said: When they took coats from PNMs, they secretly checked the labels to find the brands and designers. Class significants are another way to evaluate the young women seeking membership, she said.
“They had other ways of using clothing to exclude and include,” Ispa-Landa said.
Elite varsity sororities pursued the same goals as Southern sororities: building a group of conventionally attractive young women with ambition who would raise their profile on campus.
“I think a lot of the dress codes, formal and informal dress codes, that are part of sorority recruitment have to do with a desire to maintain the group’s attractiveness to these high-status men — sorority men,” Ispa-Landa said.
Even if, on the surface, PNMs do everything “right”—sticking to certain types of outfits and discussing harmless topics when recruiting—that may not be enough.
Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd, author of Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South, says in the documentary that recruiting is essentially “organizing people and groups of people into levels of power, status, and prestige.”
Sorority Rush, she says, is a “proving ground for competitive femininity and contemporary performance of Southern beauty.” As a result, many racially motivated elements of recruitment have survived to this day. This was evident on Bama #RushTok, where most of the “main characters” were blonde, white and skinny. In 2021, an interracial #RushTok star said she was expelled from every fraternity before she received an offer, despite her immense popularity with viewers.
Panhellenic sororities have been predominantly white since their inception in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was extremely rare for black women to be accepted into a predominantly white university. But racial segregation persisted long after black students began attending those schools, Charlotte Hogg, a professor at Texas Christian University, wrote for the Washington Post in 2020.
Black students formed Greek organizations both at Howard University, an HBCU, and at predominantly white universities. These historically black fraternities and sororities are known as the “Divine Nine” and do not operate under the same system as historically white fraternities and sororities.
The University of Alabama’s traditionally white sororities were only officially abolished in 2013 after student newspaper The Crimson White revealed that some of the organizations were actively avoiding expanding applications to black PNMs.
Courtesy of Max
Holliday, a student at the University of Alabama, was expelled from her sorority as a freshman.
Only two of the four interviewees in “Bama Rush” joined a sorority. One who was “thrown off” in her sorority’s freshman year chose not to participate in recruitment again, and another dropped out before completing recruitment because they were tired of the artificiality of the process. (She was the PNM who went shopping with Addicks; she later said none of the dresses she tried on felt like her.)
Going through a recruitment process requires a conformity probably familiar to most young women in order to find out who they are, and perhaps that’s why the process remains so popular at schools like the University of Alabama. But Ispa-Landa said many sorority members are disappointed when the idealized picture of Greek life presented at recruitment fades.
“The women in my sample were really excited and hopeful to get involved,” she said. “But when they joined, they discovered a lot of things that made them really unhappy. The rush of excitement can, in a way, hide the darker things.”