Special Occasions by Paulette and Teddy sits at 9712 Clayton Road, inside the quarter-mile of storefronts the City of Ladue calls its Clayton Road Business District — the same run of shops that holds the neighborhood hardware store and the pharmacy with the post office substation in it, west of city hall at 9345 Clayton. The business sells two things at once: prom and homecoming gowns for teenagers, and dresses for mothers of brides and grooms. It has been at this address for over a decade; Ladue News ran a short shop item on it in September 2012 with the same street address and the same phone number, (314) 997-3300, that it answers on today.
Three labels are confirmed through the designers’ own retailer locators: Jovani, Mac Duggal and Dave & Johnny. Jovani’s site counts six authorized retailers in St. Louis proper and others out in Chesterfield and Lake Saint Louis, so this is not the only door in Missouri’s eastern metro carrying that label — it is the one in the middle of the central corridor, which for a lot of families is the whole point.
The schools are all within a few minutes
Warson Road and Price Road both cross Clayton Road close to the shop, and between them they carry three of the best-known high schools in the region. Ladue Horton Watkins High School is at 1201 South Warson Road, with about 1,325 students as of the 2023–24 year. MICDS is at 101 North Warson Road. John Burroughs School is at 755 South Price Road, a 7–12 school of roughly 640. Clayton High School, which Ladue Horton Watkins lists as its rival, is at Mark Twain Circle a short way east.
That density is unusual. Most independent gown shops draw from a wide radius and a long drive; this one sits inside a residential suburb of fewer than 10,000 people, one of the wealthiest municipalities in the state, with four sizable high schools essentially in the neighborhood. Girls from two different schools trying on the same rack on the same afternoon is a plausible scenario here, which makes it worth asking whether the shop logs sold gowns by school.
What going in is actually like
This is an owner-run room, not a warehouse with numbered fitting rooms. Paulette’s name is on the door and she works the floor, and the reviews divide sharply on exactly that. Several customers describe being steered by someone who knows what suits a body and says so — one long-time shopper writes that she has “shopped with Paulette for over 30 years” and can count on a blunt verdict. Another review, from someone dress-shopping with her mother, describes the same bluntness landing as an insult. Both versions are on the same page. If you want to be left alone to browse, this is not that shop. If you want somebody to tell you the truth about a neckline in ten seconds, it is.
The hours are short and matter more than usual. Current listings show roughly 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with no evening hours; the 2012 listing ran to 5 p.m. and included Sunday afternoons, so the schedule has moved before and may again. In practice a student is coming on a Saturday or leaving school early. Call before you drive.
There is no website on file for the shop, and none of the aggregator pages that claim to describe its inventory are trustworthy — they read like generated filler. It does post to Facebook and to Instagram as specialoccasionsstl, mostly gown photos. Three things worth settling by phone before a visit:
- What the Jovani and Mac Duggal racks actually run this season. No price list is published anywhere reliable.
- Whether alterations happen in-house or get sent out, and how long that takes in April.
- Whether a gown gets registered against your school, and whether that includes the private schools as well as Ladue and Clayton.
Where it fits on the trip
Clayton Road runs west from here to Lindbergh, where Plaza Frontenac has anchored the metro’s luxury shopping since 1974 with Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus — shoes, a clutch, a second opinion, all about a mile and a half from the shop door. Highway 40, which is what people here still call I-64, runs parallel a short way south, so the trip works from Kirkwood, Webster Groves or Chesterfield without touching a two-lane road. And the block itself is walkable: restaurants, an ice cream shop, the hardware store. It is a stop, not an expedition.