Nobody walks past this store by accident. The block of Strickland Avenue where it sits, on the Mill Basin–Bergen Beach edge of Brooklyn, has no train service and effectively no passing foot traffic — a trade profile of the shop described the strip in exactly those terms. Every customer who comes through the door drove there, or was driven there, on purpose.
That is the first thing worth knowing about it. The second is that prom is not the main business. Eleanor Schain is a family eveningwear boutique: mother-of-the-bride and mother-of-the-groom gowns, wedding-guest dresses, cocktail, special occasion, plus ready-to-wear and sportswear. The store’s own account is that Eleanor, the family matriarch, started it in the basement of her Brooklyn home to support her two young daughters, and that the business has been at this for fifty years. It moved into its current storefront in 1991. The clientele runs multi-generational — mothers who bought here bringing daughters who now buy here.
Where prom fits
Four labels are confirmed on their brands’ own retailer lists: Jovani, Terani, Tarik Ediz and Dave & Johnny. Jovani’s younger JVN line lists this address for prom and homecoming specifically. Terani and Tarik Ediz are evening and red-carpet houses rather than junior prom labels, which tells you something about the kind of dress on the floor: fitted, structured, adult in cut. Dave & Johnny is the straightforward prom label in the group.
Price matters here more than usual, because the store lists its own price range on Facebook as $$$$. Call about ranges before making the trip. If a budget ceiling is the whole conversation, have that conversation on the phone.
One practical upside of a store built around mothers of the bride: a teenager shopping for prom and a parent shopping for a June wedding can both find something on the same visit. Reviewers also repeatedly bring up the seamstresses and the alterations work, which is the part most prom chains do not do in-house. One review sums the place up as “old school.”
Getting there, and when
Drive. The approach is off the Belt Parkway or down Flatbush Avenue past Kings Plaza, and the surrounding neighborhoods — Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, Marine Park, Flatlands, roughly 45,000 people in the census grouping — are car-first parts of southern Brooklyn where that is simply how errands work.
Their contact page lists the store closed Sunday and Monday, which rules out the day most families would default to. Weekday hours start at 10 and generally end at 5; listings disagree on whether Thursday runs later, so confirm by phone rather than trusting an aggregator.
The big public high schools within a few miles — James Madison, Edward R. Murrow, Midwood, Abraham Lincoln — run on the New York City calendar, which puts proms in May and June, weeks later than Southern schools. That is more runway than it sounds like, with one catch: a June prom sits inside wedding season, and this is a shop whose alterations bench is already handling wedding parties in those same weeks. Bring the dress in early.
This is not a warehouse of clearance racks. It is a small, long-running boutique where the person helping you has probably fitted a wedding in your family, and where the gown gets altered on site. Decide against it on price if you need to. Do not decide against it on the assumption that a store without a train nearby is a store without a following.