Prom Dresses Over The Years

As time went by styles evolve, change, and differ so pretty much style never stays the same for long. This is also the case with prom dresses. The length, color schemes, design, fit, and overall style of the dress changed. Every year there’s always a new type of popular dress floating around during prom. The dresses can be brightly colored, dark, one shoulder, leg slit, mermaid style, short, long, sparkly or not. As you can see there is not one definite style for these prom dresses. Upon further research, I saw the extreme change within the style of the dresses. At times these certain styles last a couple years although they eventually change.


Let’s get into the different styles now, starting off with the 1980s, they were often very big and puffy and extremely elegant. Most of the time they were white but there were some with colors such as a blue and red and a couple pink ones. By the early 2000s, the dresses were very on brand with the Y2k aesthetic and very predictable. The dresses had a common theme of being strapless, covered in rhinestones and glitter, and usually had a sparkly belt around it. The colors were so bright, often pink, blue, yellow, and purple. In comparison to the 80’s these dresses are so much more exaggerated. Now going into 2011 and such. The dresses are now really short, they’re cute, little mini dresses compared to the usual long dress that we see every year. Majority of these had a belt around it with a tight top and a really puffy bottom. They were also strapless most of the time. These had so many ruffles, bright colors , so many rhinestones, and at times funky designs. Now for the more recent times like 2021 and now. They have become more simple in a sense of course there are still many people that wear the dresses with all the rhinestones etc. Overall the new trend is more slim dresses, sometimes sold colors and with a slit.


As we can all see the dresses have changed tremendously and have way more variation around the year. Everyone always has their own preference though and I see people wearing dresses that aren’t necessarily in style anymore. Honestly as a sophomore I can’t wait to see the changes in the dresses again and I can’t wait to pick one out myself. All the years seem to have a theme that sticks and evolves and that’s great.

The picture above is the prom dresses so far from the LHS prom dress Instagram. Have fun at prom seniors!