It took trying on more than six dresses and the support and encouragement of her best friend for Julia Loversi to find the perfect dress — all without costing a penny.
Nicole Celone with her dress.
“I love the way it looks. It’s such a pretty color too,” said Loversi about her dress. Her friend Nicole Celone agreed. Celone had picked it out for her, after Loversi had left the dressing room feeling discouraged because she hadn’t found a dress, while Celone had found a dress. “I saw it and knew it’d look great on her.”
The two girls were getting dresses for an 8th grade dinner dance at their school, Barnard Environmental Studies. “It’s a dinner before we all go off to high school, so we wanted to find a really pretty dress for it,” Loversi said.
The homemade dressing room.
Loversi, Celone, and some 50 other girls tried on and received free prom dresses on Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. at the home of the LEAP youth program. Junior League of Greater New Haven hosted the event for its third year. Junior League members converted the LEAP building by setting up racks of prom dresses in the gymnasium, and creating a dressing room in the dance room using shower curtains and the metal structure of a tent. 8 – 10 volunteers came to help the girls find their perfect prom dresses. JoBella Salon and Spa also donated two free manicures and up-do’s, that were raffled off earlier on.
Celone takes a picture of Loversi in the dress to send to Loversi’s mother, who was working and couldn’t come.
As for the prom dresses, all “were donated. There are a lot of girls in New Haven that don’t have the ability to buy a really expensive dress, and there’s always that added pressure to buy a dress,” said Junior League President Pam Hearn. “We were so excited to get a big donation of dresses from members, people in the community, and another organization that has a similar event. We’re really excited to be able to do this for the community,”
Loversi, Celone, and Bishop consult a dress.
Christine Bishop, Junior League’s finance council director, helped Loversi and Celone pick out the dresses as their personal shopping assistant. “It’s just great to see when girls find the right dress. Financially, it’s a great benefit to not have to go out and spend the money and you get this beautiful dress out of it,” she said.
Bishop steams Loversi’s dress.
Once the girls found the dress, Bishop steamed and bagged it.
Jayonna Holmes (pictured above) took home two dresses. She couldn’t make up her mind on which dress she liked better, “so we let her keep both. We have so many dresses, that we can give them more than one dress,” said Bishop.
Holmes is preparing to wear one of the dresses to the graduation dinner and dance that Loversi and Celone are also attending. “I like the way they look because they’re long and classy. I’m not a girly girl, so it fits my personality too.”