Prom Dresses Are Especially Hideous This Year

It’s Prom season, and if the dresses seen in the ads and editorials of the new issues of Teen Prom and Seventeen are any indication, this year things are going to be eye-searing.

To be fair: Both magazines had some dresses that were totally fine, and both offered ideas for regular and plus-size dresses. And Seventeen did a cute feature illustrating how you could maybe wear your prom dress again, by re-styling it — although this only works with a specific kind of dress.

Seventeen also had some really cute manicures.

But! Most of what can be seen on the pages of these two publications is horrifically fug.

Let’s start with some selections from Teen Prom:

If you’re addicted to Bejeweled.

If you like Olympic Ice Dancing and sorbet.

A lot of mullet dresses this year. Added bonus: a waterfall of pink ruffles, like a bubbling brook of Pepto-Bismol.

If your dream is to look like a bedraggled sea anemone or Ursula the Sea Witch’s little sister Undula, you’re in luck!

I don’t mind the one on the left; it’s a sugary, PG-version of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” moment. But that cuckoo rococo (ROCUCKOO?) thing on the right is like tissue paper from Marie Antoinette’s shoe boxes became sentient and started trying to swallow people. RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, GIRL. Oh wait. In those shoes, you’re doomed.

Sexualization of childhood? Baby Spice chic? Teen take on Toddlers and Tiaras?

MY EYES.

“Guys, I can’t hit the after-party, I have to work the ferris wheel over at my uncle’s carnival.”

Teen Prom also has some Prom hairdo ideas. In addition to flowing waves and a pretty French braid, they’d like to suggest vulgar-looking purple glitter roots.

These bangs say, “The ways of your planet are so different and intriguing.”

Back to the dresses: I don’t hate this, but I have a lot of questions, and one of them is “Is your Prom Coming to America-themed?”

Nicki Minaj-approved. By the way, honey, those shoes will be off ten minutes into your evening.

This thing is a dress, yet shorts and lace tights are involved. ¡Complicado! Lucky magazine is pushing the Prom jumpsuit, but I worry: How will you pee? How will you get busy in the back of the limo? How will you secretly give birth in the bathroom? You have to think about these things.

Rihanna fans, you are not forgotten.

The wretched hues aside, the one on the right is shitting chiffon.

Shiny, short, ruffled, sheer, bedazzled, layered, with two different textures, three different lengths and contrasting shoes. If a migraine came in dress form, it would look like this.

Moving on to Seventeen magazine…

Princess Jasmine roamed the city streets all night, checking every brothel, opium den, gaming hell and video game arcade, but Aladdin was no where to be found. Again.

The one on the right would look fab on the triplets from Beauty and the Beast.

Caroline had spent weeks weaving nets to throw into the waves, trapping hundreds of jellyfish, which she carefully stitched together into a gown, her fingers numb from the stinging. Sure, she smelled a little fishy, but frankly, which of the bitches in her class did not? Once her plan was complete, they would not only regret not inviting her to the dance — they would regret ever being born.