By Mia Hanuska
Going into high school, girls often can’t wait until they’re old enough to go to prom, where they get to pick out a beautiful dress to dazzle the night in. A beautiful dress, that then sits in the back of their closet for ages. A beautiful dress, that will likely never be worn again. If the dress is lucky, maybe it’ll be donated, or upcycled, but many unfortunately end up in landfills.
Entering a dress store, hundreds of options in countless styles are hung not-so-neatly on their racks, awaiting a buyer. Each year, new styles become popular, and the culture around prom, or any school dance for that matter, dissuades girls from wearing the same dress multiple years in a row, as it’s common to want to “fit in” by wearing the year’s popular style.
However, purchasing a new dress for each school dance not only gets expensive, but it’s also unsustainable and encourages a culture of “single-use” outfits. Especially for prom, dresses are often well over a hundred dollars, if not much, much more. Yet, these dresses are often poorly made, made from 100% synthetic materials, which not only make the dress look cheaper, it also feel cheaper. Synthetic materials, such as nylon and polyester, are essentially plastic fabrics, which trap heat and make the wearer uncomfortable, especially when dancing and sweating all night. Moreover, dresses are often unflatteringly cut—hugging all the wrong places, lacking liners, pinching shoulders—due to the nature of fast fashion, and if bought online, typically get returned due to quality-control issues.
Furthermore, when thrown out, the plastic nature of the fabric of these dresses contributes to rising climate issues, taking hundreds of years to dissolve and contaminating soil and water. Not to mention the amount of glittery dresses that shed the virulent microplastic everywhere, becoming “potentially problematic to aquatic fauna.” Plus, the scattering of glitter to other dresses makes those non-glittery dresses unappealing to buyers who dislike glitter, and further contribute to the wastefulness of dance dresses. Now, should girls never buy a new dress? Obviously, that would be the ideal situation, but that extreme of a cultural shift is simply unfeasible. Instead, society should encourage girls to buy sustainable dresses that they can rewear other places, shop at thrift stores, flip old dresses into ones that are more likely to be worn (even just shortening & hemming can transform a dress), and donate old dresses to charities that can give them new lives. Westmont hosts a Prom Closet, where people can donate past, unwanted dresses, and The Princess Project is another ethical, local option.