Helpful Guide to Prom Dress Fabrics

Many factors will go into your choice of a prom dress – color, form, price and maybe even label. But the most basic choice you're facing will be the fabric of your dress.
When the sales person starts throwing out such terms as shantung, charmeuse or jacquard, you're eyes might glaze over or else you'll start looking for the easiest route to the exit, rather than expose your lack of knowledge about formal wear fabrics.
Rest easy. With this brief primer on fabric choices in prom dresses you'll feel a little more confident as you undertake your search for the perfect dress.

Most Common Fabric Options

Before we get into all the complexities you might encounter, let's cover the basic fabrics first, which is where your search is likely to start and finish:

• Chiffon: A flowy, empire waist dress, probably your most common option, likely will feature chiffon. Chiffon is lightweight, transparent fabric, normally polyester but it could be silk, that folds easily around itself and flows as you move about.
• Satin: A soft, smooth fabric with a sheen also creates a flowy appearance. Most chiffon dresses will have a layer or two of satin under the chiffon.

• Taffeta: A shiny fabric like satin, but one with more weight and stiffness to create the fuller look for a ball gown. An added luxury of the taffeta dress is that many designers are incorporating pockets into the taffeta skirts, as the fabric is stiff enough to hide bulges your contents might create.
• Tulle: This loosely woven mesh fabric creates your poofy ball gowns. Tulle can be lightweight and soft to create the outer layers of your skirt or the popular illusion tops or it can be heavy and stiff to give you skirt that great volume. Fortunately, your ball gown will feature a satin lining to protect your skin from the stiff, scratchy tulle layers.
• Organza: Falling into that middle ground between chiffon and tulle, organza has the transparent feel but with a stiffer body, making it a good fit for full ball gown skirts.

• Jersey: This comfortable knit fabric continues to gain popularity for fitted style dresses as it stretches and moves with you. Weights can vary from light to heavy so it's perfect to transition from warm to cold weather, too. An exciting option coming on strong for 2019 is sparkle jersey, which is just what it sounds like, a nice jersey fabric with shiny bits woven into the fabric.
• Lace: A delicate woven fabric with designs, often floral. At one point, lace was all handmade and therefore expensive, but machine-made lace has gained in quality and brought the price in line with other common fabrics. Some laces now are made of stretch fabrics as well, making them ideal for fitted dresses. 

Some Other Fabric Choices

Of course, designers are never content to stick with the standards, and as long as there are creative people out there, which we hope will be forever, you'll get other fabric choices and new choices coming along virtually every season. Here are some more choices we know you'll find available for 2019:
• Jacquard: This soft, silky fabric has a pattern woven into the fabric.
• Brocade: A type of jacquard, brocade is a heavier fabric with a raised woven pattern, often floral. Traditionally a fabric associated with royalty, brocade is making a strong trend pitch in 2019. (Just as a humorous aside, we noticed one manufacturer's line sheet referred to this is barcode for one dress, so we were envisioning a lot of stripes.)
• Damask: Another jacquard style that features typically floral designs woven into the fabric in the same color, creating a tone-on-tone look.
• Charmeuse: Similar to satin, charmeuse is lighter weight and often found as the lining.
• Velvet: A heavyweight fabric with a cut pile finish has been gaining some popularity the past couple of years, but is limited to a winter fabric by its heavy weight and warmth.
• Shantung: A middle-weight satin fabric is distinctive for its nubby texture.

We hope this guide will give you a little more confidence as you head out to look for your Prom 2019 dress. We also can lend our expertise in helping you choose the right fabric and right style to make you feel beautiful in your prom dress.