Bless a Dress offers free prom gowns
For many high school upperclassmen, prom season brings glamour, tradition and celebration to the end of a long school year.
A Western Pennsylvania couple has worked for the past seven years to help make the event possible for those in need.
Michelle Simon and her husband, Don, took over the Bless a Dress program from the K-LOVE Christian radio station in 2015. The program offers free donated prom dresses and shoes to girls who cannot afford their own during an event in the spring.
“There’s no registration, we don’t ask for any kind of financial proof that you are a low- income family,” Michelle Simon said. “We always tell the girls that the cost of the dress is your gift of kindness to someone else — so, basically just pay it forward.”
This year’s edition of Bless a Dress is scheduled from 4 to 8 p.m. April 7 and 8 and from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 9 at the Pittsburgh Indoor Sports Arena in Cheswick. The location is a new spot for the Simons’ project, chosen because of a need for more space.
“We didn’t do it last year because of COVID, but we’ve just had so huge of a response with the donations,” she said. “Butler seems to be a really big area where there are girls in need. We ‘re not exclusive to the girls in any one school district or in the city of Pittsburgh. My goal is just to get the information out there for the families.”
The event features a plethora of styles of dresses and shoes, both used and new, along with seamstresses on-site to make dress alterations.
“We definitely do get in donations of all kinds,” Simon said. “We do a lot of sorting out, weeding out things that are not in style. We will have 4 seamstresses there, and they were able to do every alteration the girls needed at the last event before they even left. We have a panel of high school girls who come in to volunteer with the set up, and they are pretty clued in to what is in style.”
Simon said 90% of the donations come from individuals who donate their own prom dresses, but the remainder come from bridal stores and other sources. Some of the dresses even came from former pageant competitors.
The dress collection has been updated over the years, Simon said, and dresses that are no longer in style are sometimes also donated to local high school theater clubs.
“We have every style of dress imaginable — the mermaid style, the big ballgown style, strapless, short, long, anything they could possibly want, I am pretty sure they will find it,” she said.
Butler County residents interested in donating their own prom dresses can bring them to a donation box at Jerry’s Car Wash in Cranberry Township or The Print Shop in Mars.
