North Americans say prom. Australians say formal. Whatever you want to call it, just get one thing right – the dress.
LEE’S TAKE
I spent my final year of high school at a Canadian school in Malaysia. We called our end of school soiree a “prom”, much to my delight. Though I lived in Australia up I was 14, I never felt comfortable with calling this rite of passage a “formal”. While growing up in the eastern 
suburbs of Melbourne I fed my pre-pubescent brain on a North American diet of Baby Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, Degrassi, 90210 and Seventeen. Everything from that continent was exotic: Gap jeans, Urban Decay nail polish, Bloomingdales, Seattle, New York, LA, Oreos, Twinkies. I would have given up the Southern Cross for 50 stars and 13 stripes quicker than you can say “Rupert Murdoch” (and I still would – currently accepting marriage proposals from cute Jewish New Yorkers). Proms are built up to so much hype in American pop culture that they seem to be the high school equivalent of the Oscars. Students spend a semester agonising about who their date will be, what type of corsage and limo to get, campaigning for homecoming king or queen, planning the hotel room they’ll lose their virginity in. Australian formals aren’t steeped in such tradition, so for Aussie students it’s just another occasion to get drunk on the Passion Pop and Bacardi Breezers they’ve snuck in.
When I was 9 I became fascinated with a blue taffeta prom dress worn by Elizabeth Wakefield in Sweet Valley High (obviously, the dress complimented her sparkling, ocean-coloured eyes). As Sweet Valley High was written in the 1980s most of the prom dresses described were taffeta. I didn’t really even know what taffeta was. I just knew that my prom dress had to be it. Alas, a taffeta prom dress was hard to come by in the year 2000, which is weird as taffeta was used in 1980s disco futurist fashion and the year 2000 represented the beginning of “the future” back then. I guess they predicted wrong.
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Next on my agenda was a red strapless gown because Jennifer Aniston wore one. I went on a search for months across every shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur but unfortunately they don’t make dresses for women who have grown out of their childhood clothes and have to wear bras for support, not just modesty. I had to settle for a black dress. Boring black. I wanted to have my Rachel Leigh Cook moment in She’s All That where she walks down the stairs all made up and – shock, horror – she’s pretty without glasses. I had contacts lenses and was going to wear makeup, a dress and heels for the first time ever. I wanted people to gasp at how pretty I was dressed up. I could not make this statement in black.
The dress was not too bad though. It had a burnt velvet floral print so at least the texture was interesting. I did not have a date to the prom but I asked this guy who I used for his car my friend Ben if he could give me a ride. This was a guy who drove me home from school every day. He was a school council nerd who was made fun of by all my guy friends because he was a pompous suck up. I thought he was harmless because he showed no romantic interest in me until the time he asked me in a salacious voice if I was “all wet” when I stepped out of the shower to answer his call.
When he picked me up for prom the first thing he said was “Mmmmm. Your dress shows off all your curves.” If he had said it in a less creepy voice I might have been okay with it, but an all out tomboy/product of the heroin chic era I was ashamed of my large breasts (I wanted to bandage them up like Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry) so I sat with my arms crossed over my chest the whole ride. I wondered if he was expecting us to engage in any physical contact after prom, a thought which I did entertain so I could get my first kiss and fuck over and done with (I am efficient) and be amongst the millions of others who lost their virginity on prom night, but since he bore no resemblance to Luke Perry it was way out of question. Also, I did not want to give him the satisfication.
I was born with two left feet so walking in heels has always felt more uncomfortable than walking on stilts while balancing a ball on my nose. To this day, I pull of heels and a tight dress with the elegance of Adam Sandler in a dress. As Ben and I walked up the stairs of the classy hotel to the ballroom where the prom was held, he told me to walk with my legs closer together so I wouldn’t look like a hooker. If only Hector Elizondo was there to give me a lesson in class.
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The prom itself was uneventful. The food was shit. The converastion was boring. Since it was in Malaysia there was no alcohol. The homecoming queen was a predictable choice. It definitely did not live up to my expectations. Does anyones?
When Ben drove me home we sat in the car for a few minutes making small talk but it was getting awkward and I didn’t want him to ask me to “thank him” for all the rides home so I cut the small talk short, said goodbye and thanks and rushed out of the car. We did not see each other again.
BEA’S TAKE
FROM VESTAL VIRGINS TO DEPRAVED DEBS: MY TWO HIGH SCHOOL FORMALS
My high school formals took place on the later half of the 1990s. If you want to imagine ’98-9, go right ahead, because that makes me feel younger. There were two formals, in Year 11 and 12. I think of them as the year nobody vomited and the year almost everyone did, respectively.
Neither of the hotels which hosted our formals were establishments of fine dining. Still it was not botulism that sent the young bodies hurtling towards the bowls and basins in Year 12. It was the more customary culprit, drink. Alcohol in its distinctly non-brut varieties, from Midori to raspberry vodka.
The Year Nobody Vomited
So why did nobody vomit in Year 11? I went to a Catholic girls school and the effect of pastoral care and religious retreats was very strong. We watched documentaries about groups of older girls who binge drank and we wondered how they had allowed their moral rectitude to collapse so completely, if it ever existed. We made floral wreaths for each other and exchanged them, dancing in the school gardens in our ugly asexual uniforms. Each of us was encouraged by our teachers to have a healthy self esteem, based on a love of God, life and ourselves. The ethos of personal regard was intended as a safeguard against the brutal elitism of life: no blooming acne, youthful plumpness, physical ineptitude or dull wittedness could destroy it.
The dogmata of care and self respect made for a wholesome and conservative Year 11 formal. Only a few of the fast girls brought male partners, because there was no pressure or expectation on the slower. Nobody brought female partners. This was the late nineties, an even more homophobic time than the one we currently occupy. Ten points for being able to spot the irony in the situation.
That year we all ate our three course meals with healthy teenage zest and acted civilised, chatting to the teachers who stood on the periphery of the room as sentinels and chaperones, should the self-love propaganda prove violable after all. They needn’t have bothered though. We tamely roasted each other by handing out awards under hilarious categories such as ‘person whose CD collection only includes George Michael’ (and fuck off I still like him). We danced sober to ‘Blister in the Sun’. Nobody was bullied, or fingered, or called a scrag.
OK, at this point you might be feeling a bit incredulous and I’ll have to admit I slightly exaggerate the cultish innocence of the Year 11 group. There was a small handful – a child’s fist – who drank and smoked that year. A scattering of rebels with craggy old boyfriends in their mid-twenties. These girls got picked up from school every day by tradie-mobiles. They belonged to a different, adult world. In an alternative route to perdition some girls had been schooled by older, badder siblings. These prodigies could assemble a bong from a Spring Valley orange juice bottle at 12. But the seedy countermovements I describe – for the sake of accuracy – were always hush-hush, something to feel a bit embarrassed about. The dominant tone was innocent debutante.
That year I was dressed prettily in a full length pink gown trimmed with pink at the ankles and around the three quarter length sleeves. My look was something like Doctor Zhivago Barbie. I displayed a hint of decolletage out of a square collar. It was very fitting, given the nourishing environment, that I was dressed like a milkmaid at a country dance. I was a virginal Tess soon to be preyed upon by some rakish Alec D’Urberville. Unfortunately that night I was one of the many unpartnered and went home alone to masturbate about George Michael (just kidding, it would have been about one of the teachers).
The Year Almost Everybody Vomited
So where did it all go wrong/right? A bubble can only expand so far before it pops and ours had by the end of year 12, letting the world rush in. Maybe it was exam fatigue or the gradual erosion of idealism. By the time of the Year 12 formal even the squarest squares, the most pitiful of geeks were assembling a pyramid of sambuca shots. Social smoking was more de rigueur at this event than at a French health spa. Parents had signed waivers to the effect that the school would not be responsible for any stomach pumps, and teachers were off at their own pubs getting wrecked.
That year all the girls dressed according to their daytime personae, just more seductive. Perhaps due to the Spice Girls having entered into the collective unconscious, it seemed like everyone was out to present a heightened, nighttime incarnation of themselves. The sporty girls wore lycra gowns with long Adidas stripes than ran along their sinewy curves. The grungy/Brit pop girls wore customised (i.e tartier) versions of their mothers’ dresses. The everygirls bought bridesmaid dresses from Myer. Having an Italian mother (and other people of Mediterranean parentage will be feeling me here) I wore a homemade gown. It was sexier than the last one though, black, tight and long, trimmed with jet beads. I yelled repeatedly at my mother to cut the front lower, which bless her she did. Thanks to my Mum I had a prodigious rack on display.
I don’t remember feeling particularly sexy though because I was dosed up on Accutane, a severe acne drug that dries out every sebaceous gland you’ve got. It turned me into a depressed raisin but I soldiered on for the promise of no more zits. On previous occasions when I had mixed this drug with alcohol I felt like a cosmonaut walking on the moon drinking the brine of pickled cucumbers out of a jar. So this night I wasn’t getting pissed. I was probably the only really sober person there.
Envisage it: I had a gothic-lite dress, thick ivory-coloured spack on my face, dry eyes and matt burgundy lipstick on my bleeding, cracked lips. I probably looked like Marilyn Manson when he wore that androgyne boob suit, remember the boob suit? And I walked around like a dark ministering angel, moving silently among the toilet bowls and holding back hair on head after head as girls purged their grog into the bowls. I cut a creepy figure but that’s OK, it’s all in the past. Now I’m an old creep. And at least I remember both my formals.
Fashion Frauds 