4 min readThere was a time when getting ready for dorm life required little more than extra-long twin bedding, a shower caddy, and a handful of posters to give those concrete walls some personality. Today’s college students, however, are arriving on campus with a much more ambitious decorating agenda.
That shift was on full display during a recent morning visit to a Target in upstate New York, where soon-to-be freshmen and their families were checking off lengthy dorm shopping lists. At the customer service counter, shoppers collected online orders filled with compact dressers, peel-and-stick wallpaper, and coordinated storage bins. One slightly overwhelmed father shared that his house had been filling with dorm purchases since the spring, when his child and their future roommate started a joint Pinterest board to plan their suite at a nearby SUNY school.
Elsewhere in the store, a young woman and her mother debated a deep green, velvet-look curtain panel ($40), which she planned to install using renter-friendly double-sided tape. A cream area rug ($70), brass-style bedside lamp ($20), and coordinating throw pillows would round out the scheme. Nearby, a Cornell-bound shopper went in a decidedly more playful direction, choosing a pink tie-dye comforter ($179), string lights ($10), and a sparkly inflatable chair ($30). Though wildly different, both setups had something in common: They looked ready for their social media debut.
As design trends have seeped into nearly every corner of our lives, dorm rooms and sorority houses have become increasingly curated, fueled by influencer inspiration, Pinterest boards, and meticulously assembled shopping guides. Prime Day now rivals Black Friday as a major back-to-college shopping event, while specialty retailers like Dormify and big-box stores offer seemingly endless ways to transform a bare-bones dorm into a highly styled space. And if the current back-to-campus frenzy is any indication, the designer dorm isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The TikTok-ification of Dorm Decor
The most jaw-dropping examples go viral on TikTok and could easily function as submissions for a collegiate version of MTV Cribs, which, in turn, ups the ante for what’s theoretically achievable. Parents—okay, moms—sometimes become the de facto design planners, spending the summer lead-up strategizing about how to pull off a perfect 10. Some might even hire a dorm-specific interior designer, a growing subspecialty within the small space design category. And while total transformation is the exception, not the rule, the pressure to compete is real—especially at Southern schools with entrenched Greek culture.
TikTok is full of these extreme examples, spotlighting rooms that look more like boutique hotel suites—with custom headboards, cabinetry, high-end upholstery, built-in seating areas, sconces—than a place where you cram for an exam. The spaces sometimes echo the grandiose stylings of sorority houses in miniature, though even the suites themselves tend to boast more square footage than those not on heavy #RushTok rotation.
Earlier this month, when Kerry Davis moved her daughter into a shared room at the University of Tennessee, she was taken aback by the high-level production of it all.
“They bring their own desks, they have their own makeup tables, wallpaper on the walls, beautiful rugs—everything you could think of,” Davis says. She noticed some grandparents in the hallway. They stuck around for hours, helping to assemble furniture.
Her daughter Courtney’s setup—with its cute Roller Rabbit bedding and framed art—seemed comparatively low-key. It made Davis wonder if she had somehow failed as a girl mom. The pressure, she felt, was more among the moms than the college kids.
“Someone said to me: She has everything she needs, and you’ve given her better gifts than a beautiful room,” she says. “I needed to hear that, because I definitely woke up Monday morning feeling like, Should I have done more?”
Kim Robinson, whose daughter, Meghan, moves into the dorms at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, this fall, didn’t feel the same pressure to rank in the dorm decor Olympics—but she was blown away by how different it was to gear up her daughter for college versus her son, who goes to the same school. (She’s hardly alone. In a recent stand-up bit, comedian Felicia Madison ticked off the long list of items her own daughter deemed essential. The punch line? “My son brought his iPhone. And forgot his charger.”)
“She’s an athlete. She’s not extravagant,” explains Robinson of Meghan. Even so, “It’s insane.” Her roommate is from Madrid, and the two young women decided to coordinate everything: Pottery Barn dorm comforters, pillows, ottomans, headboards, decorative pillows, shams, bed skirts, bedside tables, and lamps. They even have custom neon lights that spell out their names for over their beds. “I said: You better use this stuff for four years, because it costs a fortune.”
Dream Dorms on a Budget
Breaking the bank isn’t always a requirement for pulling off a high-end look or racking up millions of views on social media, though. In 2022, budding designer Alethea Jay went viral after posting a TikTok of the dorm room she designed for her little sister, complete with “diamond”-encrusted wall frames, slick lighting, and chic temporary wallpaper. In the years since, she’s carved out a niche advising on how to pull together a dramatic transformation that’s still price-conscious. “I’ve seen dorm headboards that cost $500,” she says. “For that $500, you can get a whole room.”
She also thinks the hype about students going all-out with their dorm decor is overblown. “I’ve been to a lot of dorms, and the five rooms that are most viral are not the representation of what most dorming students have as their experience,” Jay says. Are there certain students, and probably parents, who take it to a new level? Of course.
But at the end of the day, it’s about the basics: comfortable bedding, shower supplies, and wall art. Selections that reflect how you want to be seen, as much as who you actually are.
