At a prom dress giveaway in Searsport this weekend, dozens of high school girls stood in line to try on gowns, their arms overflowing with tulle, satin and taffeta in every color.
They entered the lavender-curtained dressing rooms as ordinary teens in hoodies and sneakers and emerged looking like butterflies.
There were delighted squeals from the girls. From the parents, wistful sighs and a sense of relief.
Stacy Turner, whose daughter goes to Camden Hills Regional High School, said dresses at a local shop cost hundreds of dollars and come with a guarantee that no one else at the prom will be wearing the same dress.
“I’m like, ‘OK, that’s nice, but $400? That’s a car payment,’” said Turner.
As families are increasingly squeezed by the high costs of gas, healthcare, and groceries, absorbing the costs of prom is a strain for many, said Kristie Hamlin, the community partnerships coordinator at Waldo Community Action Partners, which hosts the event, called the Cinderella Project of Maine.
A single parent making minimum wage could easily pay a quarter of their monthly income to send their child to prom, she said.
“Either they don’t eat or pay rent, or they don’t get to [give their kids] this experience,” she said.
A small group of Belfast women started the giveaway around 20 years ago. Over time, it became a project of Waldo Community Action Partners and now also hosts similar events in Gardiner and Aroostook County.
“This entire event is all about removing barriers, making it so that prom and those kinds of rites of passage are accessible to everybody,” said Monica Pettengill, the development director at Waldo County Community Action Partners.
This year, the group had 3,000 dresses to offer and expected to give out about 700.
“The dresses are fabulous. They’re really amazing,” said Turner.
The Searsport event, held at Mermaid Plaza, featured tables of shoes and jewelry and a seamstress on hand to add straps and make minor alterations. The racks were stuffed with a dizzying number of dresses in a huge range of sizes.
The gowns come from all over, Pettengill said. Dress shops from Maine and beyond usually donate some, while others came from stores that were going out of business.
Cathy Ames of Rockport brought four girls to the event — her two daughters and two of their friends, one of whom lives with her family. Ames works for a nonprofit and said that, with the costs of food and gas rising, feeding three teenagers has gotten so expensive that she has started going to a food pantry.
“We never could have afforded to buy four dresses,” Ames said.
Economist Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, tracks the cost of prom-related expenses like dresses, tickets and limo rides. The price of a prom ticket is up 128 percent since 2000, he recently told The Washington Post.
For years, prom-related costs actually grew at a slower rate than inflation, according to Zagorsky’s research. But since 2025, that trend has reversed, with the price of a limo ride jumping 4.4 percent, and the cost of a dress up almost 10 percent, he told the Post.
The Cinderella Project costs about $9,000 to put on, Hamlin said. Local donors and sponsors cover most of the costs, but it is running at a deficit, she said. With more resources, Hamlin would start a similar project for boys.
As her daughter waited to try on an armful of gowns, Heather Castner said she drove all the way from the Sabattus area hoping to find a dress without spending hundreds of dollars.
“I just don’t have the money,” she said. “It’s insane.”
And, she said, it’s even harder to justify spending hundreds of dollars on a dress when it’s only for one night.
“It’s like four hours and they’re never going to wear it again,” she said.