Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Specialty dress shops are now registering girls and their purchases.
WASHINGTON POST
For a teenage girl who has scoured store racks for weeks in search of the perfect prom dress, there is no high school clothing misstep more mortifying than the one experienced on that special night when she comes face to face with someone else wearing the very same gown.
To help girls avoid such embarrassment, and to encourage them to keep buying fancy gowns that typically cost around $200, shops across the United States have been offering a special service: They're keeping registries of gown purchases, sometimes even refusing to sell the same dress to girls from the same school.
"Girls are funny like that -- it's important to them," said Janet Naples, owner of Fairytales dress shop in Colchester, Conn., which was swamped last week with teenagers on vacation and on the prowl for prom dresses. "These girls start shopping in January."
With prices for prom dresses ranging from $125 to $500, young women are more determined than ever to make sure their gown is the only one of its kind at their party.
Typically, specialty dress shops maintain lists of area high schools, register young women and their purchases -- including style, color and size -- and warn shoppers from the same schools away from styles already purchased by schoolmates.
Stars, a shop at Riverdale Farms mall in Avon, Conn., has been keeping a registry for more than a decade, owner Joe Corso said, and he can't recall a single time when a young woman opted to buy a dress after learning a schoolmate had purchased an identical one.
They really care
"No one ever says, 'I don't care,' " said Corso, whose shop tracks purchases made by girls from 63 schools. "That's just not in the female handbook."
He allows, however, that keeping a registry doesn't guarantee that a girl from the same school can't purchase an identical dress at another shop.
"Prom dresses are mass produced -- it's not like they are one-of-a-kind originals," he said.
Larger stores with huge inventories that have to be sold typically do not offer gown registries.