I’m just gonna say it. Homecoming dresses are THE WORST.

Every August, teenage girls begin looking at dresses for their September or October homecoming dance, and mothers everywhere take a collective breath and shove down their frustration and fears one level deeper than usual.

Have you seen homecoming dresses lately? Many of them contain less fabric than a Victorian swimsuit.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’m on to you, Big Dress. Or should I say Tiny Dress? I picture you laughing it up in your dark, smokey board rooms, asking, “How much of the dress can we remove before mothers notice?”  

We noticed.

We noticed when you took the zippers off the back and replaced them with decorative ribbons tied into cute, romantic bows. We let that one go. It made sizing easier, and frankly, we were tired.

But now most of the dresses are completely backless, with a thin satin cord holding it all together through a combination of friction and prayer.

What if I want to buy a dress that goes all the way around, sir? Is that still an option, or do I need to visit a museum?

And the length? I’ve owned sports bras longer than some of these dresses. If you drop something, there’s about a 90% chance that dress is going to spring up to your waist like a sequined belt when you bend over. And don’t even THINK about sitting down unless you want everyone from calculus class to see all of  London AND France. 

These poor girls spend all night continuously pulling their dresses down to cover their cheeks or up to cover their chests instead of having the freedom to put their hands in the air like they just don’t care, as is their God-given right. Meanwhile, the boys show up in the same pants, shirt, and tie they wore to a friend’s bar mitzvah last month and spend the evening doing the worm. 

No hate for the boy moms. I’ve enjoyed that side of the equation too. Fashion is unfair. Hate the game, not the player.

Thank God this was not the prevailing style when I was in high school and already developing the childbearing hips of an eighteenth-century Norwegian dairy farmer. Though the truly baffling thing about these tiny dresses is that they’re often unflattering even on teenagers, who should theoretically be able to look good wearing a pillowcase with armholes.

This afternoon, I was hemming my daughter’s homecoming dress to a length we negotiated to “short, but not the principal has asked to speak with me” short.

And as I cut another two inches off the bottom, I fretted. Because as all moms know, this isn’t just about a hemline.

It’s about wanting your daughter to feel beautiful without making her feel that her body is a problem when a dress doesn’t work. Sometimes the problem is the dress. Sometimes the dress appears to have been designed by a person who has never met a chair.

It’s about talking honestly about both the power and the danger of dressing “sexy,” the male gaze, and the unfair assumptions and unequal standards for boys and girls.  It’s about your family values and school rules and the fact that all her friends are wearing something similar. That’s a lot to cover while she’s standing in a dressing room under lighting that has never been kind to anyone.

It’s also about remembering how one careless comment can lodge itself in a girl’s brain for decades. Someone once told me “shorts are hard for you,” and twenty years later I still hear the echo every time I try on a pair. 

I don’t want to pass on that baggage, but at the same time, I wish someone had told me a lot earlier in life that pleats would never be my friend.

So you stand with your girls in the department store, holding a dress that could fit in a sandwich bag, trying to find words that are honest and kind. You want to talk about the dress without criticizing the body wearing it. You want to be a responsible parent without being a killjoy or the villain in a teen movie.

Mostly, you want her to walk into that dance feeling beautiful and confident. You’d also like her to be able to sit down once in a while.

I don’t have a solution, unless our daughters suddenly develop a shared enthusiasm for Amish fashion. 100% cotton! Relaxed fit! Loads of pockets! What’s not to love? 

But until then, I think we can agree on one thing.

Big Dress needs to give us the rest of the dress.