Feature photo by Emma Burden
Story by Emma Burden
MTSU’s esports arena hosted a standing room only crowd Wednesday night, when over sixty students gathered to play the popular Roblox game Dress to Impress.
MTSU’s esports club hosted a three-hour Dress to Impress gaming session on Wednesday night at the Level Up Arena, a computer lab on the second floor of the Student Union. Most students who attended sat criss-cross on the floor with their personal computers and tablets in their laps since there weren’t enough lab computers to accommodate the large crowd.
“We were at a tabling event and someone asked if we played Dress to Impress,” said Lauren Turnage, who organized the event. “We said we do, and asked if anyone would attend an event if we hosted it. Everyone we’ve talked to has said yes – like, ‘Oh my god, yes, let’s go!’”
Dress to Impress launched in November 2023 as a Roblox experience and since then has amassed over three billion visits.
In Dress to Impress, players can dress their virtual avatars to fit certain themes, such as cowboys and cowgirls, aquatic life and movie characters. Users vote on the avatars with a scale from one to five stars, and the user with the most stars wins the round. The avatars parade down a glamorous, silver runway, hitting creative poses that players choose – such as the splits, the TikTok-famous “Apple” dance and Taylor Swift’s signature pose from the “Eras” tour.
While Roblox is geared toward individuals 13 and under, a growing number of adults view the game as a not-so-guilty pleasure. Dress to Impress owes its TikTok success to viral videos created by adult users. Charli XCX also recently collaborated with the game for a special “Brat” themed update.
Inside of the packed Level Up Arena, students crowded together, discussing how long they’ve played, their favorite themes and outfit ideas. Dress to Impress allows players to form duos and showcase outfits in pairs, which many students did.
Event organizers recognized students who placed first in their Dress to Impress servers. Ultimately, the players with the most first-place placements were awarded custom pins. Though Dress to Impress is a competitive game, the students in the Level Up Arena cheered for each other when they won, complimenting their avatar’s outfits and celebrating their wins.
“I have played Dress to Impress with my friends all the time,” Zoe Kuhn, one of the student attendees, said. “It’s something that we like doing together. We have a lot of fun.”
Whether they were huddled together on the floor or sitting at a row of desktop computers, there were many different friend groups in the Level Up Arena, laughing with each other and discussing their outfits. One pair of friends received many laughs — and many five-star votes — with their duo outfit for the theme ‘Country Side,’ where one dressed their avatar as a farmer and the other as a chicken.
Dress to Impress is an outlet for creativity, for friends enjoy the different outfits and interpretations of themes that other players can come up with, Kuhn said.
Dress to Impress quickly gained popularity on Roblox after its release, but became an internet trend during summer 2024. Over 2.5 million TikTok users follow The official Dress to Impress TikTok account, which averages 5 million to 10 million views per post. The Dress to Impress hashtag has over 750,000 posts.
MTSU esports faculty advisor Richard Lewis shared that the Dress to Impress event has been recorded as the highest turnout for an esports event at the Level Up Arena and for the MTSU esports club this semester.
“I was surprised,” Kuhn said, referring to the number of attendees for the event. “Because there are so many people in this room for just a little Roblox game, but it is pretty popular.”
Emma Burden is a Reporter for MTSU Sidelines.
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