There is a growing number of students who have decided to start dressing in suits and dresses, rather than the usual jeans and sweatshirts on specific days of the week. These students are part of a trend to dress nicely on Wednesdays.

Junior Loren Hersh started the fancy dress trend. Hersh goes to Thomas Edison HS of Technology in the afternoons. Because Edison is a career school, Hersh is required to dress nicely for a grade and dresses in a suit every Wednesday. Some of Hersh’s friends decided to dress formally as well and have started “Fancy Wednesday,” a movement that is slowly starting to gain more participants.

The first few people to have started dressing nicely on Wednesdays were juniors David Acevado, Johnny Pena, Jordi Berrigan and Andrew Mijango. Members of the fall show “The Crucible” have also begun to participate in this trend.

Hersh says that he did not expect the trend to become as popular as it did and admits he was a bit overwhelmed.

“It was kinda weird the first week,” Hersh said. “I wasn’t trying to convince anyone to dress up. It was scary because so many people started doing it after the first two weeks and I couldn’t stop them or say “no, don’t dress up.a��

The group of students who participate have started to refer to themselves as the U.S.S.R., which stands for the United Suit Society of Rockville. The students involved have referenced Hersh as the leader of the group, and the four juniors who started the trend have been called the co-founders.

“I know for a fact that lots of people want to dress fancy in general but never had a reason to. But now that there are people out there who are willing to come together as a society, as a family a�� and dress fancy, we can make this spread and it’s awesome!” Mijango said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what clique you fall into; as long as you dress fancy, you can be a part of the U.S.S.R.”

The trend is a clever and fun way to unite the student populations of Rockville. Instead of walking through the halls and seeing dreary school faces, staff and students alike can see smiles and nice, fancy outfits on the students.

Not only does it look nice to dress fancy, but as the participants said, it serves as a uniting factor to the school. With Spirit Week so early in the year, there are few school-wide events to dress up for and bring the classes together. But with this optional weekly event, students can have fun dressing up and seeing other students do so as well.