Sundress Challenge / Railed in A Sundress Season

About

The Sundress Challenge, inspired by the term "sundress season," is an internet challenge practiced on TikTok in April 2021 in which users film themselves stealthily having sex in public places while the female wears a sundress. The hashtag "#sundresschallenge" was banned on TikTok later that month and all videos supposedly participating in it were removed, with none resurfacing. The challenge also gave rise to the related Railed in A Sundress Season, which further inspired memes in the early 2020s.

Origin

Sundress Season

The Sundress Challenge is a derivative of the term "sundress season," used on social media (including in TikTok videos) when summer is coming to signal it's time to wear a sundress. The term has acquired a double meaning online, used to imply that it's easier to have sex discreetly in a sundress. On August 1st, 2017, Urban Dictionary^[1] user LK122916 defined the term as "Season in which you wear a sundress to be eligible to get fucked easier or easy access."

Sundress season content is collected primarily under the hashtags "#sundreseason" and "#sundreseasonisuponus".

Sundress Challenge

It's unknown when the "Sundress Challenge" started as all the videos and related hashtags have been removed from the platform, but the first evidence of it existing is a Tweet^[2] from April 25th, 2021 by @ReuvenGlezer, reading, "TikTok has informed me of the 'sundress challenge' and dear god y'all" (shown below).

Around this time, TikTok banned the hashtag "#sundresschallenge" and most related hashtags and searches for the videos for being too sexual in nature.

Spread

On April 26th, two videos were uploaded to YouTube^[3][4] claiming that the Sundress Challenge is a challenge where TikTokers jump on camera, changing outfits each time they land. This is incorrect, with the videos likely made simply to capitalize on search traffic.

On April 28th, HITC^[5] published an article detailing the Sundress Challenge, followed by Newsweek^[6] and The Tab^[7] on the 29th. Over the course of the following days, Twitter^[8][9] users made jokes and references to the sundress challenge, as well as issued warnings and disgust over the idea of it, saying it's "unsanitary" (examples shown below).

Other Twitter^[10][11] users began adding the phrase to images of attractive women or themselves in sundresses, capitalizing on the trend (examples shown below).

On June 8th, 2021, Twitter user @blahblahemily posted a meme referencing getting "railed in a cute lil' sundress," gaining over 148,000 likes and 18,400 retweets in two months (shown below).

"Railed In A Sundress" Season

After the 2021 popularity of the "sundress challenge," subsequent onsets of spring began being called "Railed in a Sundress Season," particularly on Twitter, due to the high volume of people expressing their desire to have sex while wearing a sundress as the weather warmed. The phrase was often used negatively or humorously, as many users expressed they were tired of seeing so many posts about this specific fetish. For example, on April 25th, 2022, Twitter user @xanabon^[12] tweeted, "warmer weather is approaching but I promise you can leave that railed in a sundress tweet in the drafts," gaining over 7,500 retweets and 96,000 likes in nearly one year (shown below, left). On July 10th, user @kukukadoo^[13] joked, "you are not 'getting railed in a sundress' this summer. this is america. there is no functioning rail system to speak of," gaining over 9,900 retweets and 111,000 likes in eight months (shown below, right).

The trend returned in the spring of 2023. On March 22nd, user @roastmalone_^[14] posted a joke about the incoming wave of "railed in a sundress" tweets, gaining over 3,400 retweets and 49,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References