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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Hundreds of dresses with rich pasts flow into a project to get formal clothes to prom-bound teens.
Apr 1, 2002 | On a breezy Thursday night in San Francisco, several dozen 20-something women in plastic tiaras and pink feather boas converged on the Lion's Pub to give away their prom dresses. The Lion's Pub, normally an upscale bar popular with a middle-aged gay male clientele, served up sweet cosmopolitans and salted olives while the women reminisced about fashion faux pas of proms past, pouf skirts and all.
"I wore a white full-length mermaid dress to my senior prom, which went down to the floor and had a big bow in the middle; my hair was in a spiral perm," recalled Kristi Smith Knutson, a trim blonde with fluffy hair anchored by glittering fake jewels. "Those were the days."
The meeting was the social culmination of the Princess Project, a grass-roots effort to collect used prom dresses, bridesmaids gowns and cocktail dresses and offer them to local teenagers who can't afford their own clothes for the prom. The effort has taken off like wildfire: Apparently, there are many adult women in possession of aging bow-bedecked frocks who are more than happy to purge them from their closets. And what better motivation than fashion immortality? A new generation of teenage girls will be sent to the prom cloaked in the memories -- magical and mortifying -- as well as the taffeta and lace, of their former owners.
The Princess Project is the brainchild of Knutson and Laney Whitecanack. The pair, who work together at the youth leadership training group CORO, realized in February that many of the teenage girls they worked with every day couldn't afford a dress for prom. An e-mail was sent around to 30 friends, seeking dress donations; by the next morning, Knutson and Whitecanack had 85 responses in their in boxes. Six weeks later, the group has collected some 400 dresses; they expect 250 more to arrive before the big giveaway.
"We've gotten a lot of beautiful gowns," says Knutson, "and girls who couldn't otherwise afford those gowns will look fabulous on prom day."
The Lions Pub event was a kind of social mixer for Princess volunteers and donors, an opportunity to ogle each other's cast-offs and gossip about their own prom memories. Women in stiletto sandals and designer jeans minced through the door with garment bags over their arms, and inevitably tripped over to the donation desk, where a volunteer was duly entering each item into a computer database and attaching descriptive labels to the dresses. The shiny and sparkling confections hung on a rack by the fireplace, a mishmash of contemporary and antiquated styles: here, a maribou-trimmed minidress; there, a peach satin floor-length bridesmaid dress; and between the two, an 80's-era strapless prom dress with a purple and black taffeta bubble skirt.
The dresses get distributed in a warehouse event, which the organizers described as a "dignified" affair. Each attending teenage girl and one "guest" (mostly likely a relative or friend), would be assigned a volunteer personal shopper to help them locate and try on their dresses. On-site seamstresses help tailor the more challenging garments into prom-ready masterpieces, and stylists (including a pretty blonde makeup artist who has worked with teen pop queen Mandy Moore!) stand by to offer beauty tips.
As frou-frou and dangerously un-feminist as the project may seem, the organizers say that the response has been enthusiastic, and they produce gushing e-mails to prove it. One girl wrote that the Princess Project was the answer to her prayers. Says Whitecanack, "There's an obvious need for young girls in San Francisco to feel confident and good about themselves." And while it may seem frivolous to sell self-esteem as satin, any woman (or drag queen) who has zipped herself into a strapless sequined number can attest that plumage is power. Political correctness aside, it never hurts to feel like a hottie.
And this is no ordinary dress. The prom gown can be an icon of womanhood, a drop-dead costume for the high drama that comes from mixing formality with pheromones. For some, the prom is the first golden opportunity (complete with parental approval) to swath oneself in alluring fabrics, strap on complicated lingerie, and teeter on stilettos into situations that challenge one's sobriety and/or virginity. That dress, with all its frills and tulle and sequins and bows and plunging décolletage, is the proto-wedding dress, the high-cost canvas for spilled wine and salty tears. Worn once and mothballed forever, it is an expensive keepsake. But the pictures, aren't they priceless? This is how beautiful you were -- even then.
Most of the women gathered at the Lions Pub recalled their past prom dresses far more vividly than they remembered the prom itself -- perhaps because while the event was a brief, drunken or disastrous blur, the dress was lovingly coveted and admired for months in advance. The buildup to the dance -- the planning, the corsage, the shopping -- can, like first-time sex, be more exciting than the event itself.
