Mimi’s Bridal & Formalwear has been selling gowns on North 16th Avenue since 1995, and weddings are still the center of it — bridal, bridesmaids, mothers of the bride, flower girls, tuxedos. Prom and pageant run alongside that rather than instead of it. The shop’s own listing puts its in-stock sizes at 00 through 30, plus children’s sizes 2 through 16. For a shopper in Mississippi’s Pine Belt, that size range is the single most useful thing to know before making the drive.
Four prom and pageant labels are confirmed here through the designers’ own retailer lists: Jovani, Terani, Tiffany Designs and Colette. The store is family owned and operated, and it sells the whole party out of one building — the same trip can cover a junior’s prom gown, a mother’s dress and a tux.
Where it sits
Sixteenth Avenue is Highway 15 through Laurel. Off I-59, Exit 95A drops onto it, and the store is a few blocks north of that interchange. This is the highway side of town, not the downtown blocks that HGTV’s Home Town turned into a weekend stop for out-of-state visitors. Practically speaking: you park in front of the door and you are not competing with tourists for a spot.
Who shops here
Laurel is a city of roughly 18,000 inside a county of about 67,000. The Jones County School District runs three traditional high schools — West Jones in Soso, Northeast Jones, and South Jones — while Laurel city students go to R.H. Watkins. West Jones is the largest, around 1,570 students in grades 7 through 12; Northeast Jones is closer to 950. Beyond the county line, the towns that drive in are Ellisville, Bay Springs, Soso, Taylorsville, Sandersville, Heidelberg, Stringer, Ovett and Waynesboro. For most of them, prom shopping means Laurel or a longer run down I-59 to Hattiesburg.
The pageant side is not a sideline
Towns in this county send their own representatives to Mississippi Miss Hospitality, the statewide competition that names a goodwill ambassador for state tourism — 47 contestants competed in 2025. The program also has a Little Miss Hospitality component pairing each town’s contestant with a girl aged 6 to 10 from the same hometown, and Laurel, Ellisville and Ovett have all fielded one. That is part of why a bridal store in this town keeps children’s gowns down to a size 2 and lists a separate children’s pageant category. The website also lists quinceañera gowns.
Before you go
The store’s listing shows weekday hours of 9:00 to 5:30, Saturday 9:00 to 3:00, and closed Sunday — a Saturday afternoon arrival leaves a narrow window. Appointments can be booked through the shop’s own site, and a phone call is the reliable way to check whether a specific designer or size is on the floor that week. Prom stock turns over hard between January and April, and nothing online is a guarantee of what is hanging in Laurel.