best prom dresses
Now that a loaf of bread has never been so expensive, what are we to make of the fact that the shops are full of frivolously flounced prom dresses? Perhaps fashion is having a Marie Antoinette moment, by making a pronouncement that is the sartorial equivalent of ‘Let them eat cake’. Or could it be a hankering to return to the innocence of a semi-fictional 1950s Americana landscape, when girls looked like Olivia Newton-John in Grease, and bad boys were no more threatening than a young John Travolta?
Whatever the mysterious catalyst might be, the prom dress (previously an almost exclusively American term) is suddenly very much in evidence in this country - whether in black strapless satin or gingham at Oasis, scarlet taffeta at Primark and floral prints or candy-pink at Luella. They’re eminently suitable for a confident 18-year-old girl to wear to an end-of-term celebration or post-A-level school-leaving party, and it’s also easy to envisage them on a sassy twentysomething like Lily Allen; but what about the rest of us?
If you are bored by the idea of being grown-up in a black cocktail frock, then the Italian designer Luisa Beccaria has a good selection of sophisticated prom dresses, in emerald green, lemon yellow, and rose pink, that somehow manage to balance frothy femininity with a streak of sophisticated chic. Even so, I can’t actually imagine myself wearing one, in my forties, because the prom dress is inherently a signifier of the rituals of youth. That’s why there’s something so touching about the vintage ones you can buy; slightly faded, like drooping petals, though still suggestive of the girls who wore them decades ago. (Which reminds me of the champagne-coloured prom dress worn by Sylvia Plath, and still preserved by Smith College, where she came to study in 1950.)
As a student, I used to rummage through charity shops and jumble sales for rose-print or daisy-strewn prom dresses; then wore them myself, with only the very occasional passing thought of what had become of their original owners. (Such is the self-absorption of youth.) Those second-hand flowery frocks are now long gone from my wardrobe - for which I feel a certain regret; not because I want to wear the dresses again, but I’d like to see them, fluttering in the early summer breeze from an open window in my bedroom, freshly laundered and aired, before being passed down to a new generation of 18-year-olds, who could dance their way through June in them.
