Shelling Out for a Dashing Dorm

A Friday chat about the new trend of luxe, lavish college accommodations

ESTER: Tell me about your dorm room at college, Nicole! Was it luxe?

NICOLE: No. It was serviceable, but in no way deluxe. Everything was made out of that light-colored, chunky wood, and the mattresses were kind of that blue vinyl stuff, and… you know, it was fine. But it was no Ole Miss dorm.

People Can’t Get Over This Super Extravagant Dorm Room

What was your dorm room like?

ESTER: I would have been laughed out of Ole Miss. I brought in purple bedding, a photo collage, and I think an Ani DiFranco poster. That was more or less it in terms of decor. It didn’t occur to me for a second to spend real money making my rectangle of shared freshman space look like something out of a catalogue. My roommate didn’t seem to care either, even though she was quite well off (she was a direct patrilineal descendant of a high-ranking official in the Revolutionary War). Her side of the room looked like a mudslide starting from her closet and ending at the foot of her bed. She just had so much stuff.

NICOLE: My parents bought me a bed-in-a-bag from either Target or Walmart, one of those stores, and I thought that was the biggest deal ever. All of the bedding matches, and the comforter is reversible! I also did the thing where you spend one night with an upperclass student when you do the college visit, and IIRC she told me not to bring any posters because the college has a huge poster sale. So I bought my posters directly from the college, which in retrospect I find hilarious.

ESTER: Smart, though! Everyone wants the same pictures, after all. I thought it was funny, after I’d been at college for a while, to keep a mental tally of all the Klimts on the walls and all the copies of Ender’s Game and Ishmael I saw on people’s bookshelves.

NICOLE: I was all about Kandinsky, which is really only a step away from Klimt. But yeah. In some ways it was kind of cool that I got to browse this entire room filled with posters, though. It was a crash course in art history. Do you suppose a lot of college students go into poster sales like that not knowing who Klimt or Picasso really are, and still gravitate towards their most famous works?

Also: do colleges still do poster sales???

ESTER: Don’t know! But we do know that they facilitate seniors selling dorm- and apartment-type furniture to incoming students, which is wise.

I remember surrealism being pretty popular too: Munch’s “Scream” and Dali’s “Clocks.” Accessible art! It’s cool to look at and seems relatively easy to understand, yet it still conveys the message that you’re a person of taste and soul with whom a fellow student should consider sleeping.

Ben had a record player in his dorm room. With actual records! That was smooth. Or, well, maybe some people would have thought he was trying too hard or something, but it worked on me.

NICOLE: I liked to hang out with the guys who played 007 on their Nintendo 64. Slightly different demographic. But yeah, the people who brought the extra stuff were just a little bit cooler, and maybe that’s what today’s college students (and their parents?) already understand. I don’t know. I’m getting dangerously close to a hot take.

ESTER: Singe-ing the keyboard! But, in the case of completely overhauling your dorm room, a la these 1st years from Ole Miss, is it mostly about signifying status? Setting yourself up as a Queen Bee? Or is it merely that, in this age of Pinterest, people have recognized that it’s possible, so if you have the means to do it, why not?

NICOLE: I went and looked at a bunch of other dorm pictures, and a lot of them look like the viral Ole Miss dorm. The two lofted beds with the matching comforters and bedskirts, the curtains, the little table in the middle, and the monograms on the wall. This could just be what dorms look like now.

ESTER: But god, imagine how the scholarship kids feel. I’d be intimidated, anyway. I liked that dorm rooms were relatively democratic. I couldn’t have told you how much money any of my friends’ families had based on what their rooms looked like: everyone slept next to the same cinderblock walls in the same extra-long twin bed. There was something kind of refreshing about that, to me, after high school. It was like a reset, a way to start from scratch. And, I mean, people decorated: buzzsaw plates and dried roses and whatever; some people were really creative. But there was no pressure to turn your space into a Crate and Barrel showroom.

NICOLE: I’m looking at dorm decor packages right now and I’m tempted to buy one. They’re surprisingly affordable. $129 for an entire bedding set???

2016 Teen & Dorm Bedding | Trends & Decoration Ideas

But back to your question. I feel like I could kind of tell who had more money than whom, because clothing and haircuts sometimes give that away, but we got democratized really quickly. Nobody ironed anything, nobody had air conditioning so we were all sweaty, that kind of thing. And we also came up with our own ideas of what “decoration” meant, which were — as you noted — creative.

ESTER: And to some degree, students built on that creativity while at school. Right? They developed into the people that they were while they were at school and then they wanted to broadcast those new identities, the ones that hadn’t necessarily been formed yet before they arrived. Those Pinterest-worthy dorm pictures are often impressive but they also strike me as kind of … immature? Like what a generic teen girl’s bedroom might look like in a McMansion. Which is fine, but what if you get to college and a month in you realize you’re not Regina George; you’re actually most comfortable being goth, or punk, or you get all into flannel?

NICOLE: I just googled “are people still goth.”

ESTER: Come on! They have to be, right? At least some 18-year-olds are buying fishnets and then ripping extra holes in them.

NICOLE: I think so? I’m thinking about who I usually see rocking that look, and it’s mostly adults. But I don’t really get to interact with a lot of teenagers. Point being: yes, this dorm package sets you up with an identity. There’s a lot of identity stuff involved, in a kind of weird way, like the monograms and the people who stick their names above their beds. Did anyone do that when you were in college? I remember our RAs making cutesy signs with our names on them which we immediately tore down.

ESTER: Our RAs may have made signs for us out of construction paper. Maybe.

It’s funny because, monograms aside, the design sensibility is very mainstream and conventional. There are more pictures in Slate’s enraged take on this trend, and they’re all basically interchangeable.

These Lavishly Decorated Ole Miss Dorm Rooms Are an Abomination

NICOLE: It’s this combination of girly and adult. Frames, ottomans, etc. You’re skipping over the messy part of forming an adult identity. Maybe.

ESTER: I want to know what the boys’ rooms look like. Can the girls even handle it if they go into a boy’s room and it’s just … normal? Does normal, by contrast, read like even more of a dump? It must.

NICOLE: If you search “Ole Miss boys dorm” you’ll get pictures. They’re also color-coordinated, although that just might be a self-selection thing.

ESTER: This is the first image that popped up when I did a search.

That is the nicest that dorm is ever going to look, but it’s still relatively low-key and low-maintenance. (And, with the stars-and-bars, still terrifying to me, but I acknowledge that that can be a regional thing.)

NICOLE: #RebelPride

ESTER: I really want to talk to one of these students and find out how they felt the next year, or even several months in. Let’s see if we can do that. Also, how much of this is the taste of the students and how much is the taste of their infamous helicopter parents?

NICOLE: I think a lot of it comes from those dorm decor catalogs. Or Instagram. But we could reach out to an Ole Miss student. We could call the college and talk to their PR department and get connected to someone, right? Or we could just ask our commenters if they know anyone who’s in college or who graduated recently who might want to talk to us? We’re fun!

ESTER: Yoni Blumberg! We’ll ask Yoni, our college correspondent, before he disappears forever, and report back. (Goodbye, Yoni. You were the best intern ever.)

NICOLE: (Agreed.)

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