In the late 1990s Cherie Hyams had to drive out of Hopkinsville to find pageant dresses for her daughter. When the girl outgrew them, other families wanted to buy them. Hyams went to the Atlanta market for more, and on Feb. 15, 2000, she opened Special Occasions on Liberty Street — first in space next door at Darla’s Uptown Salon, then in the building beside it after her family bought the property. Twenty-five years later the store is still at 1204 S. Liberty St., and it is still run by her.
Pageant dresses were the entire business at the start. Prom came next, when her stepdaughter and her stepdaughter’s friends needed gowns. Then bridal, bridesmaids, flower girl and mother-of-the-bride dresses, tuxedos, shoes and jewelry. She bought the neighboring property to make room for all of it. Hyams has said she has dressed several generations of the same families, and that she staffs the store partly with high school workers — which in practice means the person pulling gowns off the rack may go to school with you.
What it carries
On the prom side, two labels are confirmed through the designers’ own retailer lists: Clarisse and Johnathan Kayne. Both run toward fitted, heavily beaded gowns rather than simple satin. Tuxedo rentals go through Jim’s Formal Wear, which lists the shop as an affiliated store — useful if a couple wants the dress and the tux handled at one address instead of splitting the errand between here and Clarksville.
A store inside the pageant circuit, not next to it
Hopkinsville hosts the Western Kentucky State Fair, which ran its 74th edition June 20–28 in 2025 with pageants June 21–23 in the fairgrounds Convention Center, from infant divisions up through Miss and Ms. Plus. When the Kentucky New Era published entry details for those pageants, the address for mailing completed forms and fees was 1204 Liberty St., with Hyams as the contact number. That is the clearest thing anyone can tell you about this shop: pageant families in this county treat it as an office as much as a store.
Who walks in
The two public proms in town are about to become one. Hopkinsville High (roughly 960 students, Koffman Drive) and Christian County High (roughly 1,150, Glass Avenue) both close at the end of the 2025–26 school year, and the consolidated Christian County High School opens in August 2026 at Fort Campbell Boulevard and Lovers Lane with close to 2,000 students. One prom instead of two makes “has anyone else bought this dress” a much larger question than it used to be, and it is worth asking out loud at the counter. University Heights Academy, the private K–12 school on Academy Drive, keeps its own calendar.
Geography here runs north–south. US 41A ends in Hopkinsville and covers about 16 miles from town to the Tennessee line, tracing the eastern edge of Fort Campbell through Oak Grove, so Clarksville stores are a real alternative for families on the south end of the county. Downtown, Elleri’s Formals on East Ninth Street is the other in-town formalwear option.
There is no website on file; the shop keeps a Facebook page and answers the phone at (270) 885-1730. Published hours differ between listings, so call before you drive in from Cadiz, Elkton or across western Kentucky.