Edsel Ford High School on Rotunda Drive and Dearborn High, the one founded in 1893, send about 3,400 students to two proms a spring, and both nights begin the same way: a line of couples on a lawn at five in the afternoon, in flat daylight, with every parent’s phone up. The dance is dark. The lawn isn’t, and the lawn is where a rental shows.
Sleeves and hems
A rental ordered off a size chart arrives with sleeves at whatever length the chart guessed and trousers that pool on the shoe or float above it. In daylight, next to a boy whose sleeves end at the wrist, the guess is the whole photograph.
Fitted, in person
He gets measured first, which most boys have never had done, and the number it produces is only a place to start. What settles the jacket is where its seam lands against his own shoulder, and finding that takes trying more than one. Roman, master tailor at Lincoln Tailor, on site in our store, pins the trousers over the shoes he brought.
The table
If six friends are going together, they come in together and rent the same black or the same midnight blue, so the lawn photograph reads as a table and not as six boys who met in the driveway.
Also for Dearborn: The Tuxedo for a Gallery Reception at The Henry. More on tuxedo rentals, or plan your visit to our Oak Park showroom.
