The shop’s Google listing is filed under the name “Dody’s Dresses - By Appointment Only,” and that is the first thing worth knowing before driving into Montclair Center. This is not a store to drift into while walking Bloomfield Avenue. Appointments go through a scheduling page on the store’s own site, and the same listing carries a 4.9 rating across 37 reviews — a small review count, which fits a business that sees one party at a time rather than a Saturday crowd.
The store began as an online operation, not a storefront. Duha Khaddash started it after years of shopping with her daughters, Dana and Shahed, and running into the same two problems: quality that did not hold up, and gowns that turned up on someone else at the party. She began buying directly from designers in Manhattan’s garment district. Her own account of it is unusually specific for an “about” page: every gown is kept in New Jersey rather than ordered from the designer after the sale, which is how the site ships overnight and why a style pulled in the Montclair room is a style that physically exists.
That founding premise means more here than it would in a bigger market. Montclair High School, at 100 Chestnut Street, enrolls about 1,925 students, with a twelfth-grade class of roughly 518, and it runs a junior prom and a senior prom rather than one dance. One public high school that size, two proms: a repeat gown on the dance floor is a real possibility, and this shop is built around avoiding it.
What it carries and what it costs
Jovani, MNM Couture and Terani each list this store on their official retailer locators. The store’s own catalog is wider: JVN by Jovani, Mac Duggal, Tarik Ediz, Portia & Scarlett and Jessica Angel on the prom side, plus evening couture from Saiid Kobeisy, Khaled & Marwan, Gemy Maallouf, Jean Louis Sabaji and Edward Arsouni. Prices published on the store’s site show where it sits: a Jessica Angel style at $420, a Terani at $678, a Jovani at $1,625, and Saiid Kobeisy evening pieces from $2,910 to $3,850. There is a clearance section, marked final sale.
So there is no $150 rack. A family holding to a $300 ceiling should look somewhere else and will not waste an appointment finding that out. “Modest designs” appears in the store’s own description of its collection, and the Lebanese couture labels it carries are the usual source of that inventory. North Jersey holds one of the largest Arab American communities in the country, concentrated in South Paterson and Clifton a short drive north, and a shop stocking Saiid Kobeisy and Khaled & Marwan is stocking for that customer as much as for a Montclair junior prom.
The block, and the parking
Number 24 is on South Fullerton just off Bloomfield Avenue, near The Crescent. That stretch — South Fullerton from Hawthorne Place to Bloomfield — sits inside what the township calls the Special Parking Zone, where meters run $1.50 an hour during the day, rise to $3 an hour from 5 to 10 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, and are now enforced until 10 p.m. The Crescent deck stays a flat $2 an hour, which is the easier answer for an appointment that runs long.
- Listed hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., closed Sunday. The 4 p.m. Saturday close is early for gown shopping, so a weekday after school is often the better slot.
- The site splits its catalog into ready-to-ship and pre-order. Confirm which one a chosen gown falls under, because a pre-order has to arrive before alterations can begin.
- Alterations are not advertised as in-house. Budget for a tailor separately.
Who is within reach of this block
Immaculate Conception High School, 33 Cottage Place, is two blocks away with about 164 students in grades 9 through 12 — close enough that this is the nearest gown shop to its front door. Montclair Kimberley Academy sits up at 201 Valley Road, and Glen Ridge High School, 200 Ridgewood Avenue, covers grades 7 through 12 with 799 students just south of town.
For a second opinion, Jovani’s state directory names Jacqueline in Livingston, two Newark stores, and Park Avenue Bridals in Cedar Grove — all in Essex County, a few towns off in different directions. None of them is far. What distinguishes this address is the mix: prom labels and Middle Eastern evening couture in the same appointment, at a price floor that starts around $400.