Fashion
Free prom dresses offered through Eugene High School club program


Dozens of students gathered around North Eugene High Friday morning, browsing the sparkling dresses to find their perfect prom outfit to take home for free.
Clair Wiles, a teacher at North Eugene High, organized the event with the help of student volunteers from the Key Club, an after-school club focused on community service.
“Anyone who has been to the ball knows it can be an exclusive event,” Wiles said. “You pay to go to prom, you're probably going out to dinner, and then there are flowers, all these expectations of what should be part of prom. It can be very exclusive for students. … We want to make sure that every student feels like prom is doable and something they would like to be a part of.
How was the tradition born?
This was the third annual NEHS prom dress competition. It all started in 2022 when one of Wiles' Key Club students wanted to make prom more accessible.
“His original idea was to approach businesses at the mall and ask, 'What do you do with all your prom dresses at the end of the season?' but there was a lot of red tape within the companies that was just insurmountable,” Wiles said. “She didn’t want to give up.”
They then discovered Abby's Closet, a Portland-based nonprofit that offers prom dresses on a mass scale to instill confidence in high school students. Abby's Closet has a Sharing the Love program, which partners with schools in Oregon and Washington, donating prom dresses directly to high schools who 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 to the Abby's Closet program in 2022.
“Our first year, we were still struggling to understand what that meant,” Wiles said. “We weren’t really thinking about what the experience would be like for the students.”
The group has since gathered local seamstresses and tailors to help.
What dresses were available?
Wiles said dresses come in all shapes, styles, colors and sizes. There were long dresses, short dresses, in-between dresses. Some looked like they were straight out of a fairy tale while others were sleek and modern.
Student volunteers spent weeks organizing dresses by size so they could direct students.
“We have a lot of student volunteers, and a lot of them did this last year,” Wiles said. “They have this mentality that we help people and make suggestions because we've seen all the dresses and we know what might work for them.”
Wiles said there are no duplicates, even of different sizes. This way, students can feel unique at their prom.
“When they ship dresses, they make sure they don't ship more than one of each,” Wiles said. “There will be kids who come in and just can't find what they're looking for, because there's such a wide variety. Or they'll find the perfect one, but it's not quite right. their size. That's why we try to organize the event earlier.
Continue the competition
Currently the giveaway is exclusively for dresses, but Wiles said she is considering expanding it to tuxedos. She recently reached out to a few local retailers.
“If anyone knows me, I'm not the girliest girl on campus, and I wasn't that geeky about it at first,” Wiles said. “Then I came in and started helping students and I was like, 'Oh, wow, that dress is you. That'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. It's been really, really awesome.”
Miranda Cyr reports on education for The Register-Guard. You can contact her at[email protected]or find her on Twitter@mirandabcyr.
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