High school girls avoid prom fashion duplication

As early as December, senior girls in local schools started building "prom dress registry" pages on the social networking Web site Facebook. They use them to post photos of their gowns, fawn over their friends' choices, and warn those who are still shopping to stay away.

"It's kind of like a tradition," said Rachel Melchor, a senior at Broadneck High School. "Every year the seniors create a page so everyone knows who has which dress. It's like you're making claims so no one will have the same dress when you go to prom."

Dress shops have long kept registries, tracking which dresses they sell for which proms and making sure they don't sell the same dress twice for the same dance.

But with the Internet, all that is changing. Instead of buying from a local dress shop, more girls are buying their dresses online. That, they say, increases the odds that more than one girl will unknowingly pick and wear the same dress.

That's where Facebook comes in.

The first Facebook registries appeared about three years ago, and as prom season approaches, sites are cropping up for nearly every high school in the county.

More slinky, sparkly dresses appear every day. By press time, for example, Severna Park High School's page had 145 dress photos posted, Broadneck's had 110, Archbishop Spalding's had 134 and Annapolis High's had 60.

At each school, the story seems the same: As early as December, a senior girl hears about the registry idea and thinks her school needs one. She creates a page and her friends flock to join it. As they choose their dresses, they post model photos pulled from the designer's Web site, officially "claiming" that dress.

Then, no one else is allowed to buy it.

"I personally would not like to have someone wearing my dress," said Garwai Vuong, who created a Facebook registry for Severna Park High School in January. "As a senior, I wouldn't be happy."

Below the photos, there are sweet nothings posted by the girls, like, "This will look fantastic on you my love!" and "Oooh that's beautiful!"

But there has also been drama.

At the start of the shopping season, some girls posted as many as 10 photos of dresses they were only thinking about buying, to reserve all their top choices. Then, even after settling on one dress, some left the other photos up. That created some friction on Severna Park's list, angering girls who didn't know which dresses were still off-limits. Vuong said she had to message girls individually and ask them to take the photos down.

Broadneck High School likewise saw some tension last year, Melchor said.

"An underclassman tried getting a dress that an upperclassman had," she said. "The underclassman posted the dress first, and then the upperclassman said, 'It's my prom.' But in the end, the upperclassman knew she was wrong, because she hadn't posted it first."

Some dress shops have started "interfacing" with the Facebook sites to help their customers avoid same-dress syndrome at their proms. Mary Feeley, the owner of Mary's Bridal Boutique in Annapolis, said she has been watching the registries since 2007.

Before selling a prom dress, her employees will check the girl's school's page to see if another girl has bought the dress somewhere else and posted it online.

That's how Feeley found out that some girls post decoy photos of dresses they aren't really planning to wear to their prom. It's a way to throw their friends off and surprise them at the dance, but it can also leave open the door to double-dressing. "It's very, very, very competitive," she said.

It's true that posting a dress online can be a bit of a spoiler, said Vicci Alexander, who created the registry page for Archbishop Spalding High School. "But the pictures are of models, so it's just what the dress looks like, not what you'll look like wearing it," she said.

Meanwhile, they suspect their dates aren't spending quite so much time on planning. After all, there are no prom tuxedo registries on Facebook. "I don't think they're really looking at the (dress) pages," Melchor said of her male classmates. "They're, like, last minute."