Sequins and beads
 

Some Panhellenic what-to-wear-for-recruitment pages are taking pains to say DON’T wear sequined or beaded dresses (sometimes just sequined are mentioned).

Is this a southern thing, or is it pretty general?
Are they trying to keep PNMs from showing up in things that may be too high school prom-y?
Has sad experience taught them that unless they say this, housekeeping staff will be complaining for weeks about finding stray sequins and beads in cushions, under furniture, and caught in the carpeting?

Just a few examples:

Florida State U:
http://greeklife.fsu.edu/PH/commonqs.html#0

U. of Alabama:
http://bama.ua.edu/~npc/WhatToWear.htm

U. of Kentucky:
http://www.uky.edu/StudentAffairs/Greek/recruitbook.pdf

Tulane U:
http://www.greek.tulane.edu/document...Manual2007.pdf

Some of it maybe to communicate that you should be dressing for day rather than evening wear because weirdly sometimes girls this age don't discriminate in outfits.

(I'll see stuff sometimes at the school where I work and wonder if they thought they were going to a night club.)

The other aspect I can think of is that even in later rounds, with the exception of prefs, you might sit either on the floor or on a metal folding chair. In either case, beads might be really uncomfortable and impractical.

Or that sequins are tacky?

Oh, they'd have to mention more than sequins if that were what they were working at.

I did notice the number of times one said 'anything revealing" under what not to wear.

The no-sparkles might be the same for the actives' side of it as well.

My D brought home 10 pages of instructions regarding her GLO's required outfits for their Panhel's recruitment. They have the parties in the evening once classes are done for the day but still are to avoid "beading, sparkles, sequins or anything that screams look at me."

I just bought that first sun dress on the alabama page in blue :D

little highjack
 

Alum's comment reminded me of something I've been wanting to ask. Can I highjack here?

How much direction does your group give in regard to what actives should wear?

I know we've had threads about why groups wore, but I friend of mine who wasn't greek whose daughter is at UGA now showed me a list of what her daughter was supposed to wear as a member to do recruitment. It seemed about like the directions we were given years ago, but struck the mom as dictatorial.

Back in the day all the actives wore the same outfits - every round.

I went to a school with a much more relaxed formal rush and it's been decades but I don't even vaguely recall being told what to wear.

Personally, I think The Outfit Document is a little bit O-C . However, if it works for the chapter, then so be it.

We only wore identical dresses to prefs, but even then we were given direction on color and brand of pantyhose.

In other rounds, I remember general directions, maybe colors to wear, and we did have dress check.

I think the overall impression is probably better if the group has every member putting thought into what to wear, but my friend found it imposing.

Let me be clear: this list of my friend's wasn't even a full page when printed from email. It wasn't anything like 10 pages.

Yep, either the exact same outfit or the same styles in specific, harmonious and sometimes assigned color variations (think polo shirts, sundresses, etc.) Outfits were specific to the last detail--shoe type, hair style, accessories (including color, type size and number of rings/earrings when it came to jewelry). Dress checks were held at least twice prior to formal recruitment to ensure both compliance and consistency and fines were assessed if you weren't prepared by the final check. Preference dresses were made (and altered if needed) by a single dressmaker...thankfully total was only 40-45 way back when in the mid 80s!

I remember reading that thread, but I didn't think at the time what each of those description probably mean in terms of directions about what to buy.

It's just kind of strange perspective to have: talking to the mom about what her kid needs to buy. And of course the kid probably just presented it to her that way: look at this list, mom, you need to buy me all this stuff. (The kid is a great kid; I don't mean anything critical. I just think that is probably the way it went down. I probably would have done the same thing at her age.)

:D:D I bet if you ask any of the moms of college-age girls, they will tell you their D's said exactly that! "I NEED ___!" When my D went throught recruitment, the recommended dress for the rushees was Day 1: "really good (not stated but most definitely implied) jeans and polo; Day 2 dress slacks and top; Day 3 skirt and top OR dress; Day 4 Cocktail dress that didn't show too much skin IYKWIM. Every single one of the rushees in D's group (including my D because thank goodness we took the GC advice about kicking it up a notch) revved up the dressiness factor by a bit.

So I guess we have another round of shopping to do.....

My guess is that since your friend wasn't Greek at UGA, she's just not able to see it like you or I can. At Georgia, the sororities are very competitive with each other and it's important that every sister look her best. You never want to be the sorority with the sister who is memorable to PNMs because she:
- wore a dress two sizes too large or too small
- toppled over in too-high heels
- you get the idea
I am of the opinion that the reason chapters can be very "dictatorial" about fashion is that they don't want to leave any room for a sister who is not the most fashion-conscious to not put her best foot forward. I don't see it as a problem, really, but I was there and saw FR at UGA firsthand.

This will be my daughter's second time on the other side of rush and we have to get almost all different stuff than last year...which is so irritating. Frankly, it would be a heckuva lot easier if panhellenic would let them wear identical stuff, then somebody could just order it for everybody instead of some 21 year old girl (who refuses to get input from anybody else) coming up with random outfits that half the time cannot be found in stores (and I live in Atlanta--it's not like we don't have good shopping here!) The main problem with my daughter's list is that everything has to be solid and in colors that aren't currently the most popular. Last year my daughter needed a solid pastel strapless or spaghetti strap sundress and we could not find one anywhere--thought I was going to have to dust off the sewing machine :eek: until she finally found one....IN FRANCE. Now if she was looking for white last year, she would've been fine, but plain pastel was nowhere to be seen.

Grrrrr from the mother side. I'd rather give the sorority $300-$400 and have them buy it than spend countless hours shopping or on the internet looking for the holy grail of sundresses in a specific style and color.

I think I said something similar in the old thread: bulk ordering might end up cheaper. (Of course it would depend on how many of the items that girl owned already.)

Do they switch it around every year, NUBlue&blue, or did you happen to hit a year where they changed everything up?

(I think my friend's daughter's list is pretty similar to what the group wore last year, but I don't really know. Since she's a new member, she didn't have it already.)

I used to think the same thing about lists like that and chapters dressing all alike. Then after reading a couple of threads on here and thinking about the mechanics of 1) getting 180 women to agree on what to wear 2) trusting the fashion sense of 180 women, some of whom you don't know terribly well, instructing everyone to get "editor pant #136 in dove gray from Express" sounds like a really good idea. :)

Actually, the list isn't even that specific. It would just say "gray pants." But it does specify things like type of shoe, jewelry, etc.

And my guess with type of jewelry that it's something like "pearls" where the girls can purchase good-looking fakes from Claire's for $15 and some girls may get white and some may get pink, etc., not "Everyone must wear Tiffany's."

Yep.

I do have to say though that the items weren't things everyone would be likely to already have in her closet, but they won't be hard to find or even necessarily expensive.

i don't think that it has anything to do with the stray sequin or bead being shed in the carpet, more that it is a more specific way for the pnms to understand the appropriate dress for pref. rounds. i have heard of pnms showing up in full blown prom regalia; hair, jewelry and long dress. now, imagine how awful they feel when they arrive and see how overdressed they are.

we are fairly specific as to what the chapter i advise wears, in that the recruitment vp decides the dress for each round ;we say dark jeans, with (insert color) strappy heeled sandals and polo style shirt that the chapter is ordering. we don't specify the make. we advisors even have dress checks before recruitment to make sure everyone is on the same page. we ask that noone remove tags and that they girls hold on to their receipts until after dress check-luckily, we have not had to ask anyone to return anything(yet).

Yup, and I know of more than one instance where the outfit she showed up in on rush day was NOT the outfit that passed dress checks.

Really? Why would someone do that? If you already had the approved outfit what would make someone change?

Because they think they can get away with it. Needless to say, usually it only causes more drama (and in the worst case, a nice helping of fines!)

They think their own taste is that much better than what the chapter asked them to wear?

Because they have no respect for the importance of looks in recruitment. I think that's the only possible explanation.

What I hate is when a girl has a dress approved, loses 10 lbs, and doesn't get it altered before recruitment. The excuse? "But the outfit was approved as is." Yes, but we didn't know you would go from a 6 to a 4 over the summer. The assumption was that the dress would continue to FIT. I'm sure the exact same problem happens in the opposite direction... a girl might have a dress approved, gain some weight, and not think to have a new dress approved or have the dress taken out.

It's not just what you wear, it's how it looks on you, too. In fact, it's mostly how it looks on you.

[I know I sound so MEAN talking about fashion and recruitment, but one of my biggest recruitment pet peeves is the group of people who don't understand or take it seriously.]

I think sisters with that attitude generally don't consider the fact that the PNMs are going to be walking into a big group of women that they don't know. The coordinated outfits help the PNMs to visually distinguish between chapter members and other PNMs.

Of course it would be offensive if you were being dictated what to wear every day of the school year. But how difficult is it to suck it up for a week (or less) of formal recruitment?

And - new thought - if you see the group dressed alike for recruitment and then pledge, do you expect it to change?

Imagine my situation - second day of recruitment as a PNM, I can't figure out why all the groups are looking at me funny. Then I go into Gamma Phi - they have red dresses with blue polka dots (hey, it was the 80s) and I have THE EXACT SAME DRESS, only blue with red polka dots. Good thing I pledged Gamma Phi!

They change it a little bit every year, like this year the white skirt and black skirt are still ok, but they're going with different shirts with the white skirts and different sweaters with the black skirts.....but last year, we had to get a black skirt because they didn't like the black skirt she already had (too full? too long?) and had to get a black dress because they didn't like the $250 Ann Taylor black dress that she already owned (it had tiny beads on it that you could barely see), so had to buy another black dress. This year there is a different holy grail sundress that we are searching for....it's just frustrating when they won't go into a store and look around to see what is out there before making pronouncements on what everybody has to wear.

SWTXBelle, my daughter almost did that when she was going through recruitment a couple of years ago. We had planned out her outfits for every round, wrote it all down so she could get it all together, etc. She was going to wear a bright green polo shirt and denim miniskirt to philanthropy round, but ended up wearing a cute blouse and capri pants instead. She called and said, "I'm so glad I didn't wear that outfit, when I walked into AB, guess what they were all wearing.....bright polos and denim miniskirts!" Funny thing is...that's the sorority she ended up joining, too.

I think that's just poor planning on the recruitment chair's part. This year we had a powerpoint presentation along with our fashion handbook of real dresses that are currently being carried by real stores. So it was like, "J. Crew and Ann Taylor both have these lavender dresses that would be perfect." She gave at least two examples of each dress so that we had a good idea of what style we were going for. She even gave pictures and stores for shoes, and color swatches for both dresses and shoes!

Your recruitment chair is AWESOME.

That's EXACTLY what I'm talking about--go shopping, look on the internet and see if it's something that you can easily buy instead of making up something that doesn't exist in the retail world.

Can you tell that I'm ticked about this for the 2nd year in a row?!

(emphasis added)

See? See what I meant? :D (Sorry, just had to say it.)

The more I read here, the more I'm sure that my friend's daughter is getting off easy.

Her list is pretty basic compared to the degree of detail that you all are getting into.

Whenever we have girls complaining about wearing the same clothes someone always brings up the point that 'yes, it is wonderful that you have your own personal style, but wouldn't you rather the PNM get to know you for your spunky personality rather than the outfit you decide to wear?' Dressing similarly, oddly enough, actually makes people concentrate less on what you look like and focus more on you.

Plus I agree with what KSUViolet said-- when you need to remember a group, you would do it based on what they wore that day..