You can walk the 300 block of North Main Street in downtown Kokomo and miss this store entirely. Blye’s is on the second floor of its building — no display window at eye level, no dresses on the sidewalk. Owner Heather Duncan told Kokomo Magazine that the upstairs address is the shop’s single biggest problem, and that Instagram and TikTok function as its storefront instead. If you are driving in from Russiaville or Greentown, look for the address, not for a window.
The business has been in Kokomo since 1948, when Mrs. Blye opened the original store one block from where the shop sits now. The Greater Kokomo Economic Development Alliance credits Vickie Sofianopoulos and Loradeen Clarkson with running it for more than three decades. Laura O’Donnell bought it in 2019. Duncan came on as store manager in March 2024, spent a year learning the operation, and bought it with her husband in May 2025. So if your mother bought a dress here, the name on the door is the same and the people are not.
What is actually on the racks
Three prom labels are confirmed through the designers’ own retailer locators: La Femme, Mac Duggal and Terani. That is the mid-to-upper end of the prom market — beaded, structured, the kind of gown that shows up in senior photos. The store’s own prom page lists in-store sizes 00 through 26; the magazine profile reports the range across the shop now runs size 0 to 32. Ask what is on the floor in your size before you make the drive, because both numbers describe stock, not a special-order catalog.
Blye’s also rents tuxedos, through Jim’s Formal Wear, and does spray tanning on site. That combination matters more than it sounds: Kokomo’s other tux options, Men’s Wearhouse at Markland Mall and Louie’s Tux Shop at Boulevard Crossing, are both on the south side by the retail strip. This is the downtown one, and the only place in town where the dress, the suit and the tan are the same errand. The store recommends picking tux styles two to three months out and budgets 45 minutes to an hour for that appointment.
The one thing to plan around
Alterations are no longer done in-house. Duncan refers customers to several local seamstresses she works with. For a prom gown bought in March for an April or early-May dance, that means a second appointment with a third party, on someone else’s schedule. Factor it in when you decide how late you can afford to buy.
How the store reaches the schools
Blye’s runs an ambassador program, Blye’s Beauties, with high school students from seven area schools who model prom dresses and do community service projects; one graduating senior in the program receives a $500 scholarship. Practically, that is why you may already have seen these gowns in your daughter’s Instagram feed before you ever heard the store’s name.
The trade area is Howard County and its edges. Kokomo High School enrolled about 1,390 students in 2024–25; Taylor High School, southeast of the city, had 368. Western in Russiaville, Northwestern northwest of the city limits and Eastern in Greentown fill in the rest, and none of them is more than about fifteen minutes from Main Street. That spread — one big city school and four small county ones — is the whole customer base in one sentence.
Getting downtown is easy in a way it is not in most of Indiana. The US 31 freeway that opened in 2013 runs around the east side of town, so you exit and come west; the old route through the retail corridor is now SR 931. Downtown has two free public parking garages plus free on-street parking, and the City Line Trolley, which Travel Indiana calls the largest free public transit system in the state, runs through the core. For gowns, the alternatives are out of county: Lafayette, Marion, or an hour south to the Indianapolis suburbs.