Prom Frock Rant

[katexxxxxx]

Prom frocks!  I thought we'd never have to suffer this horrible American school habit, but we seem to have been infected with the School Prom Virus over the last few years.  And, this being Merry England, kids are trying to do it on the cheap.  So they look on the interwebs and find these cheap as chips jobs on supposedly American sites, and buy

Comments

[seraphinawitch]

Am allergic to proms and prom dresses, want to run screaming into the night. We did have a leavers ball when I was teaching, but at least les girls could just choose one of the dresses they were wearing to balls during the season...some were utterly heejus though, puff ball skirts and fish tail trains...1980's horrors of the worst kind. As for the frocks I had at uni...shall we draw a veil over the white lurex effort that under the ultraviolet lights glowed through the tent at the Sandhurst passing out ball and could be seen two miles away or the black kaftan effort that we turned into Mummy's costume as the wicked queen in Snow White for the Disney fancy dress ball? Maybe a prom dress would have been a good idea after all!

[katexxxxxx]

The two I most remember, after the Lurex thing, were the ones I made for you when you were teaching: the one with the big puffy sleeves and the skirt made of burgundy satin, and the coffee coloured one that I sent in the teeny-weeny orange parcel, which caused such a stir over breakfast!

I used the burgundy skirt pattern later to make the £7 frock I wore to the officer's mess ball with David and Debbie: bought some black nylon tulle and some 2" wide lace, dug the remains of some black crepe stuff and some black lining and a zip out of the stash and made a frock that rocked and was totally perfect and awesome for a mess decorated a la Rocky Horror show! (Looked like something Zandra Rhodes might have designed for Pro-Nuptia, but black!) That frock did at least two RHS theatre visits before ending up in the costume wardrobe at LEH! And these days I'd be charging £200 for making that frock! :D

[rabid_bookwyrm]

I went up to the factory outlets in South San Francisco and found my prom dress for $17. I wore it twice that year, and I think it's still in my closet but I'm sure it doesn't fit in the slightest anymore. It was floor length with a pleasing tulip/mermaid skirt, strapless, with a nice neckline and a laced back. The fit wasn't perfect around the bodice, but the lacing let it work out, and I didn't bother to alter it. Prom just wasn't that big a deal.

[katexxxxxx]

Very wise!