Sorority Recruitment Style Tips

Every published recruitment guide repeats the same handful of style advice, because the same handful of things go quietly wrong. This page collects that advice in one place, framed honestly as tips rather than rules: the only hard rules of rush week dressing are the ones in your own school’s recruitment guide, and the round-by-round ladder they apply to is in our sorority recruitment outfits guide. Read what follows as the experience of many previous recruitments, offered kindly.

Worth Doing

• Dress like yourself, on a good day. The members you are talking to are choosing someone they will know for four years. The comfortable version of your own style always reads better than a borrowed persona — if you never wear heels, preference night is not the night to learn.
• Keep jewelry simple and quiet. Rounds happen in small rooms built for conversation. Anything that jingles, clicks against a chair, or needs adjusting becomes part of the conversation — one quiet statement at a time, and let it be.
• Let your name tag be seen. It carries your name, hometown and major: the three easiest conversation starters of the week. Wear it where the school pins it, and keep hair, straps and cardigans from covering it.
• Choose hair and makeup for staying power. The week is heat, humidity and long days. Styles that survive weather beat styles that need a mirror every hour — and the touch-up side of the plan lives in the pouch list on our rush week outfit ideas page.
• Do the sit-down test. Most of recruitment is spent sitting in living rooms. Sit down, stand up, and climb stairs in every outfit at home; hemlines and necklines should pass without supervision.
• Break in every shoe. Nothing on your feet should be new this week. Our shoe fit guide covers the fit checks; your own hallway, worn for a week beforehand, covers the rest.

Worth Skipping

• Brand-new shoes. See above — the arithmetic of blisters does not negotiate.
• Anything you have to adjust. Straps that slip, hems that ride, necklines that need monitoring: from across the room, constant adjusting reads as fidgeting, and it costs you the conversation.
• Greek letters that are not yours. Wearing a chapter’s letters before you are a member is the classic recruitment don’t. Letters are earned at initiation’s end of the story, not worn as an application.
• Dressing for the wrong round. A cocktail dress at open house and shorts at preference night both miss. The ladder is the dress code; match the rung you are on.
• A head-to-toe copy of somebody else. Popular dresses repeat by accident every year, and nobody minds. Deliberately matching a friend outfit-for-outfit, though, blurs exactly the individual impression the week is for.

Preference Night Is the Conservative Round

The final round is smaller, quieter and more formal than everything before it, and the dressing follows: this is the week’s cocktail occasion, at the register of a formal dinner rather than a party. The standard is the one on our cocktail attire page — a knee-length or midi dress with substance, finished carefully — and the general map of codes is in dress codes explained. Torn between two dresses for preference night? Choose the simpler one. Pref rewards polish over sparkle, and it is the round where being slightly understated is never the mistake.

Bid Day

The last clothing event of the week is the least formal and the most photographed. You will very likely be handed a chapter T-shirt within the hour, so the outfit is planned from the bottom up: shorts, a skirt or a sundress that a tee layers happily over, and shoes built for a long, happy stand. After bid day the recruitment wardrobe can rest — it has climbed its ladder.