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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Marita Cooke, an effervescent fashion design student who donated a beaded purse and sequined belt, had more distinct memories of her egregious (though, at the time, beloved) dress -- a velvet mock-turtleneck gown, with a dual-layer taffeta bubble skirt in a black and white polka-dot print -- than she did of her date. "I don't remember much about the prom," she says, "But I remember getting ready, doing the hair, getting the corsage, getting really drunk." A classic of the prom memory genre.
Many of those who could remember the prom didn't exactly have rosy memories. "I had an allergic reaction to my acne medicine," recalled Michelle Finkelstein, who gave up a wine-colored bridesmaid dress (the bride divorced last summer). "I ended up breaking out in hives and going to the hospital, so puffed up that I couldn't even put on my shoes." Still, she can describe with stunning recollection the dress she was going to wear: "a white, seven-tiered taffeta strapless with a big bow on the ass." It is now long gone, however: Her mother donated the dress to a gay prom in Syracuse several years back. "She gave it to our hairdresser, who dressed up as Barbara Walters," reports Finkelstein.
The racks of Princess Project dresses were mercifully free of seven-tiered anything, though there a few multilayered ruffled and poufed skirts that were probably last worn two decades ago. The Princess Project is not rejecting any dresses, says Whitecanack, but, she adds, "We want donors to ask themselves, would I wear this? Would I let my daughter or best friend wear this?" Any dubious items that make the cut, she says, can be made respectable by removing an oversized bow here, or adding spaghetti straps there.
Of course, even Whitecanack couldn't resist the temptation to pass on her own dubious junior prom dress from 1990: "I searched high and low to find that dress -- a white opalescent halter dress that comes up like a sarong with a bow on the waist," she recalls. "I had my hair big and crimped, and I thought I was the cat's meow when I wore that dress. No one could stop me." The Princess Project's "Style Council" of teenage fashion advisors was less enthralled with the item, says Whitecanack ruefully, but she hopes that they can tailor the piece into something wearable.
More than a few women at the Lions Pub recognized the perverse -- perhaps even masochistic -- nature of enthusiastically shipping teenage girls off to the prom. Proms, women discover far too late, rarely live up to the promises of all those teen movie climaxes; and by passing on the dresses, the Princess Project helps perpetuate the myth. Then again, if the best part of the prom is putting on the dress, perhaps the volunteers are just ensuring that the girls who get free dresses will at least have that to fondly recall decades later.
A few days after the Lions Pub fete, volunteers organized the 400 dresses according to size in the Princess Project makeshift warehouse -- an empty storefront in San Francisco's ritzy Marina district, where boutiques hawking Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs line the street. It was an astonishing array of recycled splendor: elegant Escada and Donna Karan creations crammed in with demurely frothy Jessica McClintock (the de facto Fashion Queen of prom) and sexy Nicole Miller numbers, plus a handful of curious vintage items like a pleated batwing '70s gown in green polyester.
A few of the Princess Project's teenage volunteers were previewing the dresses. One petite Asian-American girl was debating between a slinky black Bebe number with an asymmetrical hem, and a traditional pink princess frock with a full taffeta skirt. She tugged at the hem of the black dress, which trailed behind her on the floor like a train, and fidgeted with the sequined clasp at the neckline. "You look great in that!" Whitecanack exclaimed, as the adult volunteers stood around the mirror and gazed at the teen with wistful eyes.
Her friend, Li Qiu, was eyeing a Jessica McClintock spaghetti strap dress in a striking gold and white check, which she picked out because it was "different." "The big look this year is one-shouldered dresses," she said, pointing out one on the rack (again, Bebe). Overall, she thought the donated dresses were pretty cute, though she giggled that there were "some dresses that are, like, really old and ugly, with puffy shoulders."
Qiu wasn't going with a date to the prom; instead, like a modern girl, she was attending with a group of girlfriends. This statement met with immense approval from the organizers, a few of whom were still nursing their own bad memories of unrequited crushes who left the prom with someone else. Attending the prom in a gang makes the date extraneous to the dressing-up, and it's a surefire solution to the neglectful date ruining the memory of a grand entrance into the hotel ballroom, taffeta rustling and heels clicking on the freshly waxed floor.
"I have said repeatedly: It's not about the date. It's all about the dress. And isn't that always the case?" queries Whitecanack, cheerily. "In fact, it's not even maybe about the dress, but about how you feel in whatever you're wearing. That's what style is all about."
