There are few days in the St Andrews calendar as chaotic and beloved as Raisin Monday. The town wakes to the sight of students parading down North Street in homemade costumes, shaving foam in hand. It’s part Halloween prequel, part fashion experiment, and part inside joke that only the bubble could produce. Beneath the noise and the mess, Raisin says something quietly revealing about the St Andrews student body.
This year, I participated in Raisin, and like most freshers, I had no idea what I was getting into. According to my academic parents, they debated between Taylor Swift eras and Hamilton characters, but ultimately settled on The Wizard of Oz because of their love of Wicked. So that morning, my family was painted green, covered in tin foil, and decked out in an eclectic mix of costume pieces scavenged and DIY-ed to perfection. I came away from the fight covered in foam, mud, and paint with a family I absolutely adore. More than anything, though, I discovered that Raisin is far more than a two-day ritual of academic family bonding. The event has deep roots in university tradition, but more recently it has morphed into a sort of performance art. A sort of sprawling, self-aware theatre of chaos. Ultimately, it’s this playful destruction that captures the essence of St Andrews more than any formal ball or red gown-clad event.Â
This destruction is found underneath the infamous foam. At the core of the chaos are the costumes themselves, and it’s here that Raisin reveals the contradictions of St Andrews’ style and identity. Across the Quad, you’ll find bananas, Smurfs, babies in nappies, or a collective of Claudia Winklemans, often thrown together with remarkable attention to detail. There’s a surprising trendiness in even the silliest outfits. Raisin is unserious, but it’s also curated. Every eyeliner swipe, every thrifted accessory, is a careful act of performance.
The costumes reflect something that goes far beyond humor: they mirror the university’s preoccupation with image and individuality. St Andrews is known for its stylistic restraint. Campus is crawling with Barbour, tweed, cable knits, and a kind of upper-crust minimalism that looks effortless but isn’t. Raisin Monday strips that back to reveal a duality. Visual restraint gives way to physical chaos. The irony, of course, is that even in absurdity, there’s style. It’s anti-fashion that still communicates taste, awareness, aesthetic control, and cultural literacy.
There’s a performative facade at work. Freshers and returning students alike are “in” on the joke, but the joke itself is carefully staged. Everyone is walking the line between funny and ugly, spontaneous and intentional. A tiny detail, like a painted-on mustache or a cheap wig, signals effort beneath the chaos. The foam itself becomes part of the metaphor: it levels everyone temporarily, disguising individuality, yet the carefully constructed aesthetics of each costume peek through if you look closely.
When the foam finally washes away, either in cold hose water or your shower, the photos start to surface on Instagram, inviting the duality to resurface. Effortless-looking students who appear naturally funny, stylish, or clever emerge as “winners,” while those whose effort looked too obvious fade into the background. Notice, for example, how I wrote about the Smurfs that have appeared on almost every news site, but haven’t spared a moment on someone dressed in a full ball gown. Raisin’s chaos is ephemeral, but the carefully curated impression it leaves is lasting. In this way, the costumes are both a release from and a reflection of St Andrews’ obsession with image — a visual satire that acknowledges and simultaneously perpetuates the very standards it mocks.
Fun, fleeting, and a little bit fake, Raisin Monday strips back the polished exterior, only to remind us that the St Andrews chic aesthetic is never entirely abandoned. Even in chaos, the facade remains. And perhaps that’s the point: style here isn’t just what you wear but how you wield it.