Most prom dresses are long. They’re designed for a girl who is about 5’8.” Length can be a challenge, especially if you are petite.
When it’s your own dress, you can have it cut and sewn to the correct length. But what if you’re borrowing a dress, or don’t want to shorten it permanently?
In the Modest Prom Rental shop, we adjust the lengt of prom dresses all the time – without ever cutting them or sewing a stitch! Here is how we do it.
First, we see what we can do with shoes. Some girls are willing to wear heels, some ar not. Some girls are comfortable in very high heels, and others don’t want to wear more than a moderate heel. But we always start with seeing how much length we can “take off” by using shoes.
Next, we look a slips. A very full slip can take 1 – 3″ off the length of the dress, because it lifts the skirt up and out. What you can do with a slip depends on the style of the dress and on personal preference. You can only use a very pouffy slip if the skirt of the dress is full. Some girls prefer a straighter silhouette, but many like the princess effect of a very full skirt. When this is the case, we add a big pouffy slip to lift the dress a few inches.
And last but not least, some dresses can be shortened temporarily just by pinning. For example, dresses with pickup points (puffs of material tacked to an inner skirt or lining) are easly shortened just by pushing the pickup points up a little more to make them deeper, then pinning the excess length up into the fold. A dress that has a seam between the bodice and the skirt can sometimes be shortened by pinning a pleat at that seam.
In any case, in the rental shop, we can almost always adjust a dress to the right length by using one or more of these strategies. We’ve taken as much as 6 – 8″ off dresses without ever cutting or sewing a stitch.
Just remember – shoes, slips, and pinning.