Olivia Day doesn’t throw on just any old outfit when dressing for her summer job working in the House of Representatives. She’s got an audience to serve.
So on a recent Friday, Ms. Day, a 21-year-old intern for Representative Cory Mills, Republican of Florida, put on a blue and white seersucker suit from Loft with Sam Edelman loafers, whipped out her phone and recorded an “outfit of the day” video to post on TikTok, where she shares her looks — her OOTD, in social media shorthand — with her roughly 7,800 followers.
Some posts of her get-ups — a more casual one for a day when the House was not in session featured an Old Navy button-up shirt with white H&M jeans — get a few hundred likes; others, more than 8,000.
“I’ve had a bunch of girls come up to me and actually a couple guys, too, being like ‘You’re the OOTD girl,” Ms. Day said in an interview. “‘You’re the Hill OOTD girl.’”
For decades, the public’s view of Congress has been dictated largely by what is captured on C-SPAN: a mostly homogeneous tableau of lawmakers in no-nonsense business attire, making speeches, casting votes and going about their days with nary a fashion statement to be found — and certainly not talked about.
Congressional interns, long a fixture of summertime in Washington, were there to be seen but not heard. They were charged mostly with menial tasks such as answering phones and responding to constituent mail while adhering to one cardinal rule: Do not call attention to yourself, only to the member of Congress you serve.
All of that has changed with the latest generation, a group raised on social media and eager to use it to share every aspect of their lives. On TikTok these days, the main characters on Capitol Hill are often entry-level, college-aged 20-somethings like Ms. Day, recording “fit checks” in the marbled hallways or on their walks around the Capitol grounds.
On weekday mornings, young people working in Congress can be seen propping their phones against the Capitol’s stone edifices, posing and smiling before heading into work at one of America’s most storied institutions.
Their posts reflect a relatively new phenomenon in the culture of Congress. The Washington edition of the newsletter outlet Axios recently called it the “Bama Rush-ification of the Hill,” a reference to the wildly popular TikTok-fueled trend of women at the University of Alabama chronicling their sorority rush rituals — including detailed breakdowns of their outfits — on social media.
They can also humanize a deeply unpopular institution that feels remote to many Americans, highlighting young people who appear elated to have the chance to work in the nation’s capital.
“I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s just so cute and heartwarming to watch all of these interns coming into D.C. and just making vlogs and being so excited about what we take for granted,” Nirvana Khan, a Washington-area resident since 2020, said on TikTok of the influx of posts.
The hashtags #hilltern or #hillintern on TikTok provide a seemingly endless stream of intern-centric content. Some interns post their outfits while walking by the U.S. Supreme Court. Others document their time walking through the Rotunda. And who could scroll past the video of an intern lip-syncing “Schoolhouse Rock!”
“I’m just a bill. Yes, I’m only a bill, and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill,” Morgan Garrett, who interns for Representative Erin Houchin of Indiana, mimicked in a post, while sitting on the steps of the Capitol like the cartoon bill in the children’s animated short who sings an explanation of how a bill becomes a law.
Such posts can be an antidote to the image that Congress has carved out for itself in recent years as a dysfunctional, politically fractured institution where partisanship reigns, mudslinging is a daily reality and the work environment remains hazardous for many young people.
These interns paint a different picture.
“I have gotten a lot of comments,” Ms. Day said of her OOTD posts, in which she is laughing, smiling and posing in different corners of the Capitol Hill complex. “A vast majority of all of them are: ‘How did you get this internship?’ ‘This looks awesome.’ ‘This is my dream.’”
Ashton Hudson, an intern at a lobbying firm, is seen in one video spinning around with his arms wide-open in front of the Capitol dome, with overlaid text that says, “DC maxxing.” According Mr. Hudson, who works at Polaris Consulting, the Hill can be an idyllic place for college students.
“A lot of people, including myself, come here and have a stereotype of D.C., where it’s all old people or people of power, and they leave whenever Congress is out of session,” said Mr. Hudson, a 20-year-old student at the University of Colorado.
Then Mr. Hudson went on TikTok and learned otherwise. He said he has posted content from the speaker’s balcony and the National Mall, in the process making friends with other young people.
“It’s fostering a community that just wants to connect and have fun while we’re all in D.C. for the time being,” he said.
Representative Sara Jacobs, a San Diego Democrat and self-proclaimed millennial, said social media videos showing off outfits or morning routines could be written off as a frivolous trend. Ms. Jacobs herself was flamed by Jon Stewart for posting videos of herself talking while applying makeup in the car. Still, she said there was a reason such content resonated online.
“People want to know that we are real people,” Ms. Jacobs said.
Frothy posts on Congress are not confined to interns. Many members have come around to showing off their outfits. Lauren Green, a congressional reporter at The Washington Examiner, routinely captures lawmakers’ OOTDs online, along with her own.
Representative Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican who recently posted a “day in my life” video, said the posts make Washington relatable in a way that other means of communication cannot.
“What members are doing, and what staff is doing, and what interns are doing all gives people around the country a window into Capitol Hill,” Ms. Cammack said. “Which I think is very, very powerful.”
