By: Dami Bankole
You’re dancing to the world’s worst No Hands remix while your friend is throwing up their Everclear in a bush. A pledge is holding her hair, and a brother on a table is yelling about how everyone who isn’t getting with one of them needs to leave. You look up at him, ready to roll your eyes, when they snag on his outfit. He’s wearing a Brooks Brothers quarter zip, but you can see the long-sleeve polo with thin stripes peeking out. His khaki pants stop just above his shoelaces, and you can guess that under his Birkenstock Bostons are a pair of Nike athletic socks. The Arc’teryx beanie that sits atop his bro flow haircut gleams in the moonlight. The outfit is familiar. You remember seeing it on that JPMorgan junior analyst who skipped you in the Cava line and on the SoHo-based influencer you met filming a TikTok in the Bad Roman bathroom. You think to yourself, What’s going on? When did you frat bros become fashionable?
What’s going on is a system as old as America itself, functioning exactly as intended 250 years later. Chi Phi, established in 1824 at Princeton University, was the first American college fraternity as we know it. According to the Princeton Order Celebration it was created to “promote the circulation of correct opinions on Religion, Morals, and Education”. This established the core ideals of leadership, brotherhood, academic excellence, community service, and moral character that fraternities claim to uphold by selecting ‘the best and the brightest’. Naturally, this meant the richest and whitest. Despite initiatives such as scholarships and mandated integration intended to increase racial, religious, and socioeconomic diversity, fraternities remain so steeped in wealthy WASP culture that they’re practically calcified in it. This is particularly evident in the clothing. Frat fashion (hereinafter: frashion) is ubiquitous across all American universities and colleges, regardless of school size, status, and state.
Attilio Cicozzi, an SAE member by day and Dartmouth student, told me that Dartmouth frashion includes straight-leg jeans, chinos, and sweatpants, as well as quarter zips and Synchillas. Brands like Patagonia, The North Face, Barbour, and Arc’teryx are commonplace in everyone’s closet. For shoes, the 2002R and 990 series New Balances, Nike Air Forces, Killshots, Dunks, Reebok Club Cs, and Vejas are popular, along with Blundstone Chelsea and Hunter boots. Ned Tower, a full-time Phi Psi member and part-time student at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce, added that frashion at UVA has a lot of khaki pants and Comfort Colors fraternity or band T-shirts. Despite being 600 miles apart, the difference between UVA and Dartmouth frashion is largely practical rather than stylistic. Across both campuses, premium brands and visible logos are often just as important as the clothes they sit atop. Brothers at Dartmouth wear more boots and outerwear to cope with the snow, but the underlying uniform remains nearly identical.
Ordinarily, frashion isn’t typically considered trendy and may even be offensive to look at. Despite this, many of these brands, pieces, and styles have been trending in both the fashion world and in the broader cultural zeitgeist today. New Balances have gone from being the dad/finance bro shoe brand to something that fashion mfs love, and Barbour has transformed from a symbol of Tory farmers and Southern gentry to being coveted by the West Village early majority. Fraternities have long been mocked as juvenile relics of old college life, yet their aesthetic persists with surprising authority. Many of the brands indicative of frashion are expensive heritage brands, the type that you would have to be “in the know” to know about and afford.
And, ok, what’s the big deal? Clothes change. Trends cycle. Pants get slimmer and khakier, and Timbs gets traded for Bostons. But frashion’s ascent isn’t a general shift in taste caused by baggy fatigue and fireman clasp overexposure, but a shift in aspiration when aspiration is never politically neutral. It’s no coincidence that in a time where everyone is obsessed with who belongs, in bathrooms, in colleges, and in the country, we’re looking to the institutions that practically defined American exclusivity for how to dress. When people are calling hotlines on their neighbors, and students are getting kidnapped for looking different, it makes sense that we want to emulate the group of people that will always be safe, and in America, this looks like wealthy, educated white men with a high level of social capital. This is the fraternity archetype. Even as colleges and their affiliated organizations push for diversity, a push often met with skepticism or resistance, fraternities continue to reproduce the same elite networks with little room for change. When progressivism feels incomplete or unpopular, the visual codes of wealth and whiteness in frashion become default markers of belonging, reinforced by the fraternity networks that continue to reward conformity and inherited status.
So much of the conversation surrounding the rise of conservatism in fashion has been dominated by womenswear, but it’s men’s fashion that evolves the slowest. It has long prioritized practicality and understated markers of status over trends and conspicuous consumption, which makes it much more resistant to constant reinvention. So when reinvention does occur, it often reflects a broader cultural shift rather than a fleeting trend. Frashion going from frashion to just men’s fashion in really no time at all might just be the biggest indicator of America falling back in love with what’s white, elite, and familiar, and it’s given frashion a new kind of cultural power. Beyond being safe, it’s cool. Cool in the way that Margiela tabis, co-op grocery stores, and The Row Margaux bags are cool. Its cultural takeover isn’t about polos or quarter zips at all, but about how in moments of cultural uncertainty, we don’t innovate, we retreat. We repackage hierarchy as heritage and call it timeless. In a world where taste is politics, frashion isn’t just clothing; it’s a costume of belonging in a society more obsessed with who belongs than ever.
Sources:
cufashionsociety.com 
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