On any given Saturday morning in January, a line of high school juniors and seniors forms at the door of Miss Priss, a specialty prom boutique in Lexington, Kentucky. Some girls have driven four to five hours from rural towns, arriving before the store opens at 10am to get in line. Others have flown in from as far as Washington State. The owner of Miss Priss, Elizabeth Cruse, will sell more than 100 prom dresses before the day is over.

Cruse has been running Miss Priss since 2003, which is long enough for her to now dress the daughters of those she once dressed as teens. Her website alerts customers that on busy days, she operates “like a restaurant”: the wait for a dressing room can stretch to three hours during peak prom-fitting season, which Cruse says is in January. “The day after Christmas is when prom starts here,” she says. Most of the girls are accompanied by their parents or their grandparents, so once they’ve chosen dress options, they’ll use the occasion for a long family lunch before they’re called back to the fitting room.

High school girls are doing the same thing across the country — Wisconsin, Plano, Atlanta — throughout the winter months. According to Sherri Hill, the founder and designer of her namesake brand, some customers start visiting their local prom retailer as early as November, especially if they’ve booked a design consultation for a custom-made gown — Hill travels to many of her retailers for customs, which may cost more than $4,000.

“When I was a kid, you looked at prom dresses in teen magazines,” says Casey Lewis, who writes Gen Z trend-focused newsletter “After School”. “I knew the cool dresses from what was in Seventeen. None of these brands were DTC [direct-to-consumer] or sold at a mall store, or even, in many cases, a department store. You could only get them at wedding or formal boutiques.”

More than two decades later, the tween magazines may have dwindled, but prom-goers are still shopping in-store. “In-person shopping isn’t really a thing anymore, except for prom,” says Reagan Smith, a senior at Plano Senior High School in Texas, who mostly shops brands such as Free People on sites like Anthropologie. Smith bought her prom dress at Terry Costa, the Dallas-area boutique where Sherri Hill is the dominant brand.

Commitment to tradition

Traditional wholesale prom dress brands, such as Sherri Hill, Jovani, and Ashley Lauren, among others, are still dominating #PromTok despite competition from newer, TikTok-native brands on the scene, such as Princess Polly and Lulus. Lewis, who scrolls TikTok professionally to track Gen Z behavior, spent weeks this year studying the PromTok space. “I’ve taken notes of some of the labels,” she says. “And they’re all very traditional prom retailers who previously didn’t have any sort of DTC presence whatsoever.”

The wholesale boutique might sound like a wistful ’90s flashback, but the proof is in the data that the model is still working, at least for now. According to Andrew Roth, CEO of Gen Z research firm Dcdx, the three legacy houses — Sherri Hill, Jovani, Ashley Lauren — totaled 96.4% of branded TikTok engagement across the nine major prom-adjacent labels tracked between February 2023 and May 2026. Sherri Hill alone made up 82.4%. Other labels tracked were Mac Duggal, Faviana, Revolve, Lulus, Princess Polly, and Anthropologie.

“We are not even thinking about [going DTC] at this point,” says Hill, who has reported double-digit annual sales growth for three consecutive years; a cumulative increase of 64.3% since 2022.

The yearly routine hasn’t changed much since the designer started making dresses in 2008: twice a year, Sherri Hill, along with the rest of the legacy prom houses, convenes at AmericasMart in Atlanta, where three full expo floors are dedicated to prom. Retailers, like Cruse of Miss Priss, attend in August to place their orders for the following year’s proms, and in April for homecoming.

For the model to work, the wholesaler-boutique relationship needs to stay in perfect balance, Hill and Cruse explain. Hill promises exclusivity to her boutiques (for example, another Sherri Hill retailer would not be allowed to open nearby Miss Priss), and in turn, Cruse moves her dresses.

“It’s just the model that works, in all honesty. We just found that this is what works best for us,” says Liza Greenberg, who has worked with Hill for a decade since her start as a prom dress model (she now runs sales for the brand).

Hundreds of miles north, in Manhattan’s Garment District, Abraham Maslavi runs the showroom for Jovani, the prom and bridal house his father founded in 1983. Jovani sold over 107,000 prom dresses this season alone, according to Felicia Garay-Stanton, who runs PR for the brand. Prom accounts for roughly 40% to 45% of Jovani’s annual sales; evening and mother-of-bride or groom collections take another 40%, with the rest going to homecoming, bridal, and couture.

Jovani’s prom dress prices can stretch up to $5,000 (its average dress costs $900; by contrast, many of e-tailer Princess Polly’s styles will only set you back $100) but, according to the designer, some of the brand’s strongest sales are in lower-income regions such as West Virginia, Arkansas, and Mississippi, where, despite per capita incomes well below the national average, the institution of attending prom is strong. “West Virginia is the poorest state per capita,” Maslavi says. “We sell so many dresses there. I was always bewildered. And it’s really that everyone helps that prom girl at this moment in her life to get the best dress. The whole family pitches in.”

Economist Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, has tracked the cost of attending prom — dress, suit, shoes, hair, nails, dinner, transportation — since 2014, after once being taken aback at prom ticket costs for his own children. To the surprise of many parents, he’s found that prom has remained one of the more affordable rituals, rising about 47% since 2000, against a 93% climb in the consumer price index. However, in 2026, tariffs did cause dress prices to spike by around 10%. Tariffs on imported fabric from China and India ran as high as 50%, Maslavi says, forcing Jovani to raise retail prices roughly 20%: its first meaningful price increase in roughly a decade. The brand absorbed the rest of the tariff cost itself.

Customers came through anyway. High school senior Emma Wendt, who hails from Abbotsford, Wisconsin, found her $900 Sherri Hill marked down to $500 at JP Togs and negotiated a payment plan with the owner. She paid for half of it with money from her job at a childcare program. Her mother covered the rest. “I paid for half, so I don’t feel as guilty for buying such an expensive dress,” Wendt says.

A trendless prom season

If 2026’s defining prom dress trend is anything, it’s that there isn’t one. Cruse at Miss Priss, Greenberg at Sherri Hill, and Maslavi at Jovani all agree that this year, there isn’t a particular style in demand. Last prom season, however, had a single, headline-making viral dress — a corseted floral ball gown, which Sherri Hill reportedly sold tens of thousands of. “Girls were doing anything they could possibly do to get their hands on [it],” according to Greenberg.

Lewis also isn’t seeing many vintage or thrifted dresses on PromTok. “You’re not seeing like the girl in the beautiful vintage dress, the Jackie O dress, or something,” she says. And despite it being “the most iconic prom movie ever”, girls today don’t align with Julia Stiles’s expressive, grunge prom look in 10 Things I Hate About You, either. “I honestly don’t think prom is one of those nights that you want to be too individual. It’s such a fine line, sort of like high school itself. They’re expressing themselves in color or with detail, but at the same time, so many of these girls are [dressing] pretty much the same.”

While vintage prom dresses haven’t grown mainstream just yet, Lewis has noticed an uptick in PromTok-driven resale demand. “I’ve seen so many girls say, ‘Will you rent this to me?’ or ‘Will you sell this to me?’” she says. “And all the responses, when they do respond, are like, ‘No, I’m not selling; I’m keeping it.’”

Peer-to-peer rental platform Pickle reports that prom-related rentals are up 199% year-on-year, prom searches are up 216%, and listings are up 143%. But Pickle’s most-rented prom dresses are from designers that one might discover on Revolve or Fwrd, for example, rather than classic prom retailers: Manning Cartell, Zimmermann, Andres Otalora, and Nookie.

The bulk of teen prom resale, for now, is happening off-platform. Smith resold last year’s prom dress to a girl at her school. In Wisconsin, Wendt’s friends post theirs on Snapchat with a price and a “text me if you want this dress” caption. Some boutiques, including JP Togs, have begun running back-rack consignment programs, where a prior year’s customer can return her dress for half its resale value. Sherri Hill, contractually, doesn’t permit any of its boutiques to rent its dresses. “I think [allowing rental] diminishes the brand,” says Cruse.

According to Lewis, there is a real opening for brands and marketers in paid prom content. Neither legacy houses or e-commerce brands have moved into prom dress gifting, or even sponsorships. “Most of it does happen organically,” Greenberg says of Sherri Hill’s TikTok presence. Jovani started its Instagram in 2012 as a platform for user-generated content, and runs the It Girl program (a modeling competition that doubles as ambassador development), but doesn’t yet operate paid creator partnerships at scale.

Affiliate revenue for prom attendees is also an untapped opportunity. Lewis has noticed that girls are asking where others’ prom dresses are from in the TikTok comments section, and, while creators may be tagging them, they’re rarely seeing an affiliate kickback. LTK’s prom affiliate revenue this year went to Revolve, Nordstrom, Lulus, and Target. Sherri Hill and Jovani weren’t on the leaderboard.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Lewis says, until brands start using PromTok as a real opportunity. “I kind of feel like this is the year that brands are going to wake up to prom, sort of how they woke up to RushTok. And then it’s going to be a very different landscape next year.”