The address is Suite 103 of an office building on A Avenue NE, a block north of First Avenue East on the northeast side of Cedar Rapids. Fostani calls the space a “little showroom” on its own booking page, requires an appointment to see it, and says it cannot take showroom appointments during the peak/busy season. It does not spell out which weeks those are, but for a prom shopper that is the whole point: the months you most want to try a gown on are the months the door is least likely to open. Call before you drive anywhere.
What Fostani mostly is, then, is a designer-gown retailer based in Iowa that does its volume by shipping. The brands it is authorized to sell are not small ones:
- Mac Duggal
- Terani
- MNM Couture
- Amarra
- Clarisse
- Jessica Angel
- Johnathan Kayne
Its own site sorts prom gowns into three price bands — under $250, $250 to $500, and $500 to $1,000 — and the clearance end of the first band runs down to about $125. Ground shipping in the US is free over $249. The site advertises no sales tax on orders shipped outside Iowa, which means Iowa buyers are the ones paying it. Customer service hours are posted in New York time, 10 to 5, so 9 to 4 here. Note also that some brand retailer locators list a 972 Dallas-area number for this business rather than the toll-free line.
For local families, the practical comparison is walk-in floor space. Dream Dress reopened for the season inside Lindale Mall, farther out First Avenue East, in an 8,500-square-foot former Victoria’s Secret with more than 1,200 dresses starting around $200; it advertises Amarra and Clarisse among its labels, so there is real overlap with Fostani on two of the seven. West of town, Hope’s Bridal & Prom works out of the pink barn in Atkins and has been in business since 1972. Between them they cover the students at Kennedy, Washington, Jefferson, Xavier, Linn-Mar, Marion and Prairie without anyone having to order sight-unseen. Fostani’s pitch is different: it is where you find a Terani or an MNM Couture style number that nobody in Linn County has on a rack, and you plan for a fitting after the box arrives.
One other thing the catalog says about where it sits. Fostani runs its storefront in Arabic as well as English and keeps a standing modest-dress collection, not a seasonal one. Cedar Rapids has had an Arab-American community since the early 1900s and is home to the Mother Mosque of America, built in 1934 on Ninth Street NW — the oldest surviving purpose-built mosque in North America.
Almost everything written about Fostani in public review sites describes a package and a size chart rather than a fitting room. Treat the showroom as a bonus you have to ask for in the off-season, and treat the phone line as the front door.