The Promenade

It must be prom time soon for all those lucky high-schoolers, because Yahoo! just popped up with a list of the twenty strangest "prom dress" searches they've seen via their search engine. I have to say that my favorites so far are "camo prom dress" (what a way to show support for our troops, or perhaps your premature decision to join the armed forces, where everyone wears spaghetti straps and fake eyelashes?) and "plus size Gothic prom dress." I have to admit, and Jeanne can fully confirm this, that I was a big ol' wallflower in high school and in fact, was only asked to prom once, fewer than twenty-four hours before. Finding this to be rather declasse on the part of the male friend kind enough to think of me on a Thursday night, I gently refused. The main reason for that, I suppose, was because I had nothing to wear.

Really. Nothing to wear. Who keeps prom dresses in their closet at age seventeen, just in case someone asks them? Still, I think about it sometimes, considering that prom seems to be a pivotal moment in many young women's lives. If I were magically transported into the past and had a beautiful man on whose arm I could prance into prom (hello), what would I wear? Underwear, probably. And my glasses, of course.

This is a cute, classic little number, although red has never been my color--even when I was a teenager.

This pinstriped halter dress could be cutely rockabilly with green velvet pumps, and I DID have awesome tiger-striped cat's-eye glasses in senior year...

Seventeen-year-old me probably would have chosen something like the relatively demure black Vera Wang or this sailor-collared black silk dress, then stood in a corner and thought about the literary influences and convergences between the work of Vladimir Nabokov and Mishima Yukio. Ah, youth.

Nowadays, I'd probably choose something like this from Behnaz Serafpour, clean-lined, sharp and jewel-toned. Oh, my goodness! I will just have to leave the reformation of teenagers' dignity and style today to designers like her, Marc Jacobs, and a GLORIOUS new line I just discovered (a year late for their Spring 2006 line), Abaete.

Sigh. You know the only reason my mind is wandering and thinking about prom dresses is that tonight's Law & Order: SVU is a rerun.

images from anthropologie.com, bluefly.com and nymag.com.