Formal Season : Bare or Borrowed, Glamour Is the Watchword for Promwear
“Gotta be the dress.”
That’s what Andrea Day was thinking when she was named winter formal queen at Dana Hills High in Dana Point last week.
After all, the flowing canary-yellow gown did come from the same place she got her homecoming dress. And she won that title too.
A senior, Day is a veteran of formal dances. So where does she buy her lucky gowns?
She doesn’t. She rents them.
A regular customer at A Night on the Town in Santa Ana, Day spends $80 to $100 each time she takes out a formal for the evening. But what she’s renting is a designer dress that would cost four times that to buy.
A generation ago, winter formals were held in the gym, there was a king and a queen, and many girls wore dresses their mother made.
Welcome to Winter Formal 1999, where glamour is the watchword and the dress is everything. A high-end, $300 beaded dress at Windsor Fashions, a chain that’s a first stop for most high school shoppers, has been a surprise big seller this season.
Renting has become a popular alternative to buying otherwise budget-busting gowns, but most girls still purchase their winter formal finery, retailers and school officials say.
They also swap with one another and shop at outlet stores such as the Jessica McClintock Co. Store in Huntington Beach, where twice yearly blowout sales draw customers from as far away as Utah, Oregon and Las Vegas. The Utah bunch arrives with two vanloads of girls who buy all their social dresses for the year.
The Jessica outlets, one in Huntington Beach and one in Montclair, are stocked with about 12,000 gowns from the previous season. But the designer releases corseted-top ball gowns each year, and there’s not a big difference in style, according to outlet manager Nola Bowser.
There is in cost. What sells at the boutique level for $175 to $500, is tagged from $79 to $169 at the outlets, she said.
Ball gowns are the look this season. Pastels are popular, especially lavender and pink, and bustles are back. Fancy footwear at Lakewood High’s formal was dyed-to-match satin flats that cost about $30. Enterprising girls bought satin ballet slippers for about $10 less, said Stacy Mungo, student body president.
The dances themselves are held everywhere from school gyms to posh hotels. Hollywood High is planning a winter formal at an Armenian restaurant. Mission Viejo High is going to Knott’s Berry Farm, where ball gowns and tennis shoes will be the order of the evening for many.
But no matter where in the Southland the event is held, one thing is universally true. When it comes to dressing up, “the girls really far outdo the boys,” said Geri Buckner, assistant principal at Los Angeles’ Belmont High.
Today’s formal gowns, Buckner admits, are more mature than what she wore.
“My mama wouldn’t [have] let me leave the house. These dresses dip in the front, they dip in the back and they’re so tight you can hardly move. But times do change,” she said.
School officials have resigned themselves to the spaghetti straps and mini dresses that are the norm at semiformal dances and the cleavage-baring or backless gowns at formal dances. Dress codes are not too restrictive at most dances and seem aimed more at boys--no baggy pants, no tanks.
It’s no jeans, no tennis shoes, no bare midriffs at Hollywood High, but, beyond that, the school tries not to be too stringent, said Keri Lew, teacher and leadership co-advisor.
“We’re in an area of varying resources. We don’t want to say you have to wear black pants because some may not have them,” she said.
If a policy were to demand that skirts had to be so many inches long, a school would run into trouble, she explained, because what looks acceptable on one person could be too revealing on someone tall.
Still, fashion is a dictator that is hard for parents to deal with.
“It’s frustrating as a parent to try to find modest dresses . . . last time we went shopping she probably tried on more than a hundred dresses,” said Debra Peck, whose daughter, Joelynn, was on the coronation court at Villa Park High.
The quest for the dress took first-time winter formal shopper Tami Weintraub to three malls. A freshman at Capistrano Valley High in Mission Viejo, Weintraub wound up spending $50 for a gown on sale at Robinsons-May. She bought two dresses along with shoes and a purse to go with the first dress, decided she liked the second one better and returned everything else.
The dress she kept? A fitted black velvet number with spaghetti straps, a butterfly design and a slit on the side. She accessorized with a rhinestone purse and butterfly hair clips.
Despite the good dress deal, her total expenses--including makeup, hair and the dance itself--$300.
Incidentals can be a killer. There are shoes, gloves, evening bags and stick-on bras for backless dresses. “A lot of girls walk out with six pieces along with their dress,” said Lisa Ramey of Windsor Fashions at the Brea Mall.
Borrowing is one solution.
Jenny Beam, a junior at Villa Park High, has bought more dresses than she’s borrowed but she decided to wear a friend’s gown to the school’s winter formal last Saturday.
“I just didn’t want to go out and buy one,” said Beam, who is a slender 5 feet, 4 inches and finds it hard to get formals that fit without having them tailored. The dress she borrowed from a petite friend was a pale green Jessica McClintock.
Does she ever wear her formals twice? “No. Never. Everyone else borrows them,” she said.
If a date doesn’t attend the school, he or she must pass muster with school administrators. Most schools want to know the nonstudent’s name in advance. Some require a picture ID at the door and others, such as San Clemente High, phone the nonstudent’s home to “make sure that person is OK,” said Heather Siegel, activities director.
The expense and bother of a winter formal are worth it, students and school officials say.
Pam Stanfield, activities secretary at Mission Viejo High, notes “For the most part, the kids love getting dressed up,” she said. “But in the long run, it’s the looking back.”
