Preference Night, or better known as “Pref Night,” is the night that potential new members involved in rush ultimately decide which sorority they would like to become a member of.
For active members of the 11 sororities on campus, this is the night that they get to show the potential new members what their sisterhood is all about.
“There’s no screaming or dancing like the other rounds,” junior Jacquee Schlick said. “[Preference round] is where [the active members] show the heart and soul of the sorority, share the creed, and let potential new members see what being in a sorority really boils down to: sisterhood.”
While some rounds of recruitment allow for a more casual dress code, preference night calls for something other than running shorts and a big t-shirt.
“Preference night requires more formal wear because it is a very serious round,” Schlick said.
On preference night, active members match in the same formal dress, which requires sororities to order a mass quantity of the same dress. Thomas Brothers Formal Wear in Oxford sends all their preference dress orders to their sister store, Kay’s Kreactions, in Tupelo.
“We work on anywhere from 400 to 500 dresses each year,” owner of Kay’s Kreations, Margret Long, said.
In order to measure all the girls, tailor each dress and make any other needed alterations, the seamstresses at Kay’s start working on the dresses in the spring.
“We start working on the dresses in April,” Long said. “We go to the houses that have chosen us to work with and take measurements for everybody. Then, we send those measurements to the dress manufacture and we receive the dresses back in our store around the end of July.”
But the work does not end in July.
“Once we get the dresses back in, we go back to the houses and pin anything that needs to be fixed,” Long said. “We’re usually done with everything by the end of August.”
Long could not say how much money these orders bring in because different factors affect the final total, such as how many dresses are ordered and how expensive the dresses are, but working on so many dresses at one time is not a challenge for Kay’s.
“Working on these dresses gives us a break in between our normal seasons,” Long said. “We have been doing this for about eight years and have a good system to make sure everything runs smoothly.”
Even though Kay’s receives a lot of business because of preference orders, those orders do not interfere with other customers.
“Every customer is a priority at Kay’s,” Long said. “We’ve been working on preference orders for so long that those orders to not interfere with other appointments.”
