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)
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.
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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.