The perfect dress: How these Eugene high school students found free prom dresses

Dozens of students milled around North Eugene High on Friday morning, perusing sparkling dresses to find their perfect prom attire to take home at no cost.

Clair Wiles, a teacher at North Eugene High, organized the event with the help of student volunteers in Key Club, an extracurricular club centered on community service.

"Anybody who's been to prom knows that it can be an exclusive event," Wiles said. "You're paying to go to prom, you're probably going to go out to dinner, then there's flowers, all these expectations about what should be part of prom. That can be very exclusive of students. ... We want to make sure that every student feels like prom is doable and something they'd like to be a part of."

How did the tradition start?

This was NEHS's third annual prom dress giveaway. It started in 2022 when one of Wiles' Key Club students wanted to make prom more accessible.

"Her original idea was to approach businesses at the mall and ask them, 'What do you do with all your prom dresses at the end of the season?' but there was a lot of corporate red tape that was just pretty insurmountable," Wiles said. "She didn't want to give up."

They then discovered Abby's Closet, a Portland-based nonprofit that does a wide-scale formal dress giveaway to inspire confidence in high schoolers. Abby's Closet has a Sharing the Love program, which partners with schools across Oregon and Washington, donating prom dresses directly to high schools that then distribute dresses to their students. Since 2019, Abby's Closet has donated more than 7,700 dresses to high schools.

North Eugene first applied for the Abby's Closet program in 2022.

"Our first year, we were still kind of struggling with what it meant," Wiles said. "We weren't really thinking about what the experience would be like for students."

Since then, the group has gathered local seamstresses and tailors to help.

What dresses were available?

Wiles said there are dresses of all shapes, styles, colors and sizes. There were long dresses, short dresses, in-between dresses. Some looked like they were from a fairy tale while others were sleek and modern.

Student volunteers have spent weeks organizing the dresses by size so they could direct students.

"We have a lot of student volunteers, and a lot of them did it last year," Wiles said. "They have that mindset of we're helping people, and making suggestions because we've seen all the dresses and we know what might be a good fit."

Wiles said there were no duplicates, even in different sizes. This way, students can feel unique at their prom.

"When they ship out dresses, they make sure that they don't ship more than one of each one," Wiles said. "There'll be some kids who come in and just don't find what they were looking for, because there is such a wide variety. Or they'll find the perfect one, but it's not quite in their in their size. That's why we try to do the event early."

Keeping the giveaway going

Currently, the giveaway is exclusively for dresses, but Wiles said she's begun looking into expanding to tuxedos. She recently reached out to a few local retailers.

"If anybody knows me, I'm not the most girly girl on on campus, and I was not as geeked about it when it first started," Wiles said. "Then I walked in and started helping students and I was like, 'Oh, wow, that dress is you. It's the perfect dress for you.' Their faces light up, and they're so excited ... It just helps them feel more positive about themselves, about their body, no matter who it is. That was just really, really awesome."

Miranda Cyr reports on education for The Register-Guard. You can contact her at mcyr@registerguard.com or find her on Twitter @mirandabcyr.

This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Free prom dresses offered through Eugene high school club program