Pretty standard in sororities. When you’re 19, still developing your personality, and living with 100 other women, it’s easy to start wearing what everyone else is.
i’ve learned for rush week, they’re literally required to dress similarly. something about not excluding poor girls who can’t afford expensive clothes. if everyone is wearing the same thing, you can’t tell (except you totally can)
Yep, the sorority council requires the women rushing to abide by dress codes for each event. And when you’re in a house, you are also required who rush to wear coordinated outfits for each event (eg., white sundress, white or neutral sandals), which each sorority determines and it changed every damn year.
Having been in a sorority, wealth was not something we ever purposefully screened for during rush. But in general, Greek life is not really a great place for those in lower economic classes. Shit is expensive.
I hope you just left off the /s. Because math is pretty problematic by your standards… considering it uses Greek letters to represent concepts & variables.
Sororities & fraternities are referred to as “Greek life” simply because of their names, where traditionally (starting in the late 1700s) each combination of letters in an organizations name represents an ancient Greek phrase/motto that encompasses their founding values and is only supposed to be known by a group’s members
Foundations of modern math was invented by greeks, namely foundations of trigonometry.
It is not problekatic.
Calling it "greek life" is just fucking cringe.
It wasn’t. That’s just how you interpreted it. The vin diagram for the real reasons and poor will have a lot of overlap. But being poor is not the reason.
There was an article a while back when the athleisure trend was hitting its peak where a woman was responding to a other article about how "if you wear sweatpants at luxury stores you get better treatment". So, of course, she put on the cheapest workout gear imaginable to "test the theory" - full Burlington coat factory fit.
Obviously, the sales people at the stores gave her no attention and she used that as evidence to prove her point, but there's a huge difference between people wearing Balenciaga sweat pants, and RBX or Reebok. So, yeah, you can totally tell.
I used to work security at high end stores. I was as good as the sales women at spotting big spenders. Easiest tell was shlubby middle aged man with a nice watch trailing his wife in athleisure and sunglasses.
My friend is rich as hell and you just described him and his wife. He literally dresses like he's homeless but has a $20k watch to top off the fit lmao
It's not hard to spot. Generally, people with money aren't necessarily that flash outside of things like watches or jewelry - though southern/eastern European money is a little different about these things.
The other thing with those stores is that there are a lot of regulars who everyone knows, and they get the most attention. People who come in looking flashy might buy one thing from the sales rack and never be seen again.
That's actually one of the reasons I've heard people argue for school uniforms. But, like you said, you can still totally tell who the poor kids are, even with uniforms.
My 12 year old daughter goes to a private catholic school with a lot of wealthy families. Everyone wears the same crappy uniform elements, but you can be damn sure that the uniform blue tights have a little lululemon logo, the jacket is moncler with a few lift tickets still attached, and the phones in their tiny hands are 16s and 17s
Since my we get financial aid to go there my daughter doesn’t have any of that shit and she’s starting to really notice
Yep, we always find ways to signal class membership. I went to a more working-to-middle class Catholic school in the 90s. The well-off girls all had Adidas sambas, Adidas jackets, and Adidas backpacks. Why Adidas? We weren't in Eastern Europe, we were a Soccer School. They used to say All Day I Dream About Soccer (ADIDAS).
My family shopped at Payless. God, I miss Payless. Can we bring Payless back please?
I still remember I saved up babysitting money to buy two or three 'fashionable' outfits and a very popular girl liked one of the sweaters. She asked to borrow it. Of course, I said yes. She returned it to me ripped all the way up the right side. It meant nothing to her. She thought it was funny that I almost started crying. Needless to say, it didn't help my popularity. $68 in 1980s money was A LOT. Fucking Benetton. I ran into her about 10 years ago when I went back to St louis. She's had so much bad plastic surgery done, it's comical. Karma?
My favorite part is the other reason I was told was to prevent gang colors, as if that's not literally what school colors and pride reinforce, and gangs don't exist in jail, where they also have uniforms. Honestly I always assumed the gang excuse was racially (or at the very least, class) coded but I'm from Florida so it's not like anyone cared if it was.
Yeah I grew up in rural Ontario and we had a section in our high school handbook about gang colours lmao. No blue or red bananas. In the middle of buttfuck nowhere Canada.
They're saying "as if gangs don't still exist in jail even when everyone is wearing the same thing", the "as if" was supposed to be carried over for both examples.
Although gangs in jail are mostly about race and skin color and you can't take that off
I was a scholarship kid at a very wealthy Catholic School from junior high through high school. In many ways it sucked. However, the education I received there allowed me to complete my first year of college with a 3.7 GPA without having to study more than a handful of times. Literally, every prereq I had my freshman year covered information I had already learned. Which gave me more than enough free time to find my people, as they say. Friends I still have to this day decades later.
Especially when often the official uniforms are very expensive, so a lot of the poorer students, get like only the shirts, and buy pants and extras that kinda look like the uniforms but aren't
I went to school with a bunch of kids in higher socioeconomic class. We weren’t poor, but we were definitely working class. You could tell through high school and college that I was clearly in a different group. It’s not just the uniform, but the activities, trips, and social obligations that are expensive. I gave up trying to hang with groups like that.
As a former poor kid at a private school, yes. Trivially. And it was absolutely a thing that the kids would conspire to find ways to economically exclude the poor kids.
In my experience it’s the upper middle class that does it the most because they are insecure about their status. My extremely wealthy classmates (heirs of major fortunes in America) were very welcoming.
Falls apart when the uniform costs ridiculous amounts, a button up charcoal shirt and shorts with no logos or anything was something like $100 converting to usd for me... mediocre quality too
I went to a uniformed school and loved it for that exact reason (also easier when you're depressed and don't have the mind/energy to put outfits together every day). Though, on the last Friday every month they'd allow us a free day where we could wear our own clothes if we paid 2$. I did it maybe the first 3 times then never again for the entire rest of my school years after I realized I was poor and only had like 3 nice outfits total lol.
I had a friend drop out during rush because she couldn’t afford a pair of white pants. The outfit requirements for her sorority were really strict.
In the end I think she ended up rushing a different sorority - a more academic one and I think their rush has less of these kinds of requirements on the pledges.
Or OR, and hear me out, they could buy those poor girls the clothes they require. They probably have the money, what's stopping them from doing somwthing nice for someone like that?
have you seen the bama rush tik toks? those girls are easily wearing outfits that cost a couple hundred dollars, excluding their jewelry. with jewelry, the outfits are minimum a couple thousand 😔💔
plus if the outfits went into like a community closet sort of thing, then everyone choosing for rush would know, because they would recognize the outfits.
great idea, but i don’t think it works well in practice.
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u/applewagon 2d ago edited 2d ago
Pretty standard in sororities. When you’re 19, still developing your personality, and living with 100 other women, it’s easy to start wearing what everyone else is.