University of Wisconsin-Madison students dressed in bright yellow banana suits and took to State Street Saturday, Sept. 26, for a bar crawl aimed at breaking two Guinness World Records.
Now in its second year at UW-Madison, LineLeap’s Banana Bar Crawl brought costumes, banana-themed apparel, themed challenges to the downtown stretch and a unique kind of whimsy.
UW-Madison was one of 80 U.S. colleges participating in the 2025 tour, which aims to set records for both the largest bar crawl and the most people dressed in banana costumes. Guinness has not yet released the results.
Seniors Mia Schmitt and Angelina Olsen joined the crawl in banana suits. While Schmitt first encountered the bananas in 2024, Olsen said she only recently discovered them.
“[We] come back from class, and you see people in banana suits. We didn’t really know why everyone was in banana suits,” Olsen said.
Schmitt said she saw the event grow from a few students to a campus-wide spectacle. “It started with one group of people in banana suits. I was like, ‘Maybe they’re just doing something fun?’ Then there was more,” she said, highlighting the trend’s growth.
Aiden Tighe and Luke De Haas are the co-founders of the Banana Bar Crawl. De Haas is also the CEO of Mosea in 2019, a marketing agency that aims to boost student-oriented companies. After Tighe and De Haas saw a TikTok video of a group doing a bar crawl in banana suits, they used Mosea to bring the Banana Bar Crawl to life in November 2023.
According to Celia Tise, the Banana Bar Crawl representative at UW-Madison, the setup process for the event begins by determining which schools to visit, typically three to four months in advance, before submitting advertisements and surveying local students for their favorite bars.
Participants had to purchase a $25 ticket through LineLeap, a mobile platform for joining and organizing nightlife events. The ticket included the complementary banana suit, drink specials and merchandise. Within designated pickup hours, ticketholders went to Red Rock Saloon the day before and the day of the crawl to receive their banana suits.
Tise said community building is the primary purpose behind the bar crawl. The crawl originated in Ontario, Canada, where the attendance at past events has climbed to roughly 3,500 participants – shy of the Guinness World Record for the largest bar crawl goal. The current record was set in Kansas City, Missouri, with 4,885 attendees in 2013.
Tise said the bar crawl’s purpose goes beyond record-setting.
“I love doing this because everybody loves a good opportunity to hang out,” Tise said. “I think whimsy is being lost all the time. What a great thing that one, I get to have a job where I get to go help people have fun. And then two, people get to dress up in banana costumes and feel free to just be as goofy and whimsical as they want for one day.”
Students embraced the absurdity. Jusuf Ademi called the crawl “almost as if someone reached into my dreams and made a bar crawl around my dreams.”
Others watched from the sidelines. Sophomore Tavio Revilla said she hadn’t known about the bar crawl until stumbling upon it.
“The fact that it’s for whimsy is something that I enjoy,” Revilla said. “I want there to be more whimsy. Especially in this time of political division. Maybe the bananas could bring people together.”
Staff writer
