If you bought a prom dress in White County twenty years ago, you probably dialed (501) 278-5177. You still can. When Reba’s Formal Wear in Searcy sold, the buyer, Tabatha Coughlin, moved the business a few miles northeast to Judsonia and renamed it Fancy’s Formal Wear — and kept the phone number. Reba’s own page said as much when it announced the sale. So the shop at 505 Van Buren Ave is new in the sense that the sign is new, and old in the sense that it is the same formalwear business White County families have been calling for years, now on the other side of the Little Red River.
What it sells covers most of the reasons a family ends up in a formalwear store: bridal, mother-of-the-bride, prom, homecoming, pageant, quinceañera, and suits and tuxedos for the men. Alterations are done in house — the store lists itself as a sewing and alterations service as well as a dress shop, and describes tailored fits as its specialty. On the menswear side it is an affiliated Jim’s Formal Wear rental store, which is what makes a one-stop trip possible: dress for her, rented tux for him, hem taken up by the same people who sold you both.
Brands you can count on finding
Three prom labels list this store on their official retailer locators: Ashley Lauren, Ava Presley and Clarisse. Faviana names the Judsonia store on its own site as well. Those are the confirmed lines — call before you drive if you are hunting a specific style number, because a small-town store’s floor turns over fast between homecoming and prom and no locator page tracks what is on the rack today.
The schools closest to the door
Judsonia is a city of 1,854 people, and its teenagers are split between two districts:
- White County Central High School — grades 7–12 on Highway 157 just north of town, about 370 students, maroon and white, the Bears.
- Riverview High School — the Raiders, in purple and silver, whose district serves Judsonia, Kensett and part of Searcy from a campus on Raider Drive. The high school enrolled 316 students in 2023–24.
Both are small enough that a prom is one room and one night, and that a dress registry matters: at that size, two girls in the same gown is not a hypothetical. Searcy adds the larger crowd a few minutes away — the county seat, 22,937 people, plus Harding Academy’s PK–12 enrollment of more than 500 and Harding University’s 6,000-plus students, who generate their own steady demand for formal and semi-formal wear.
Getting there
Van Buren is Judsonia’s old main street, running down toward the 1924 swing-truss bridge over the Little Red River that carried traffic before the highway moved. Highway 367 bypassed the downtown in 1949, and the town was rebuilt after the March 1952 tornado that killed dozens of residents here in the deadliest outbreak in Arkansas history. Practically, that means the storefront sits off the through route rather than on it: you come in from 367, which runs from Cabot northeast through Judsonia to Bald Knob and Newport, or down Highway 157 from Pangburn and the north end of the county. Parking is street parking, and the drive from Searcy takes minutes, not an afternoon.
For families in the northern half of White County — Pangburn, Bradford, Bald Knob, Rose Bud — the alternative is a considerably longer run to Jonesboro or down toward Little Rock. That is the practical case for the Judsonia store: it is the near option, it does its own alterations, and it dresses both halves of a prom couple under one roof.