Registration opens January 1. The shop logs every prom dress it sells against the buyer’s school, which is why its own advice to shoppers is to come early and get first pick. In a corner of New York where a graduating class can run under two hundred students, that registry is the practical argument for buying a gown in person on Genesee Street instead of ordering one off a website and hoping.
The other half of the argument is the fitting rooms. There are twenty-one of them, and the store makes a point of the fact that you can try on as many dresses as you want without waiting for a room to open up. That matters most on a February Saturday, when three or four groups of friends from different districts show up at once.
What’s on the racks
The Princess Shop stocks more than 1,000 dresses at a time and restocks with daily shipments, so the floor changes through the season. It is an authorized retailer for Jovani, La Femme, Faviana, Alyce Paris, Clarisse, Colette and Dave & Johnny — each of those labels lists this address on its own store locator. The store also runs a price-match guarantee and is blunt about why: designers set the price authorized shops are allowed to charge, and a dress from the same photo selling for a fraction of that online is, in the store’s words, a counterfeit. If you are comparing an in-store tag against a too-good price on a website, that is the explanation you are looking at.
Prom is not the only reason people come in. The same store carries mother-of-the-bride, business and casual wear, and it is an authorized Brighton dealer, which is where the jewelry and handbags come from. A mother and daughter can settle both dresses in one stop.
Timing and hours
Extended prom hours run from the end of January to the middle of May, which is the real shape of the Central New York season: shopping starts in deep winter for a dance that lands in late spring. Outside those months the schedule is shorter and it moves, and the store asks people to check its Facebook page or Google listing for the current day’s hours rather than publishing a fixed set. Appointments are available. Call before you drive in from Rome or Herkimer County.
The trade area
New Hartford Shopping Center is the older, open-air kind — a strip on Genesee Street anchored by The Olde Wicker Mill, with toy shops, candy, shoes, restaurants and small clothing stores around it. It is not the mall. Sangertown Square, also in New Hartford, sits across town on Seneca Turnpike between Route 5 and Route 8, and Consumer Square is its own separate cluster. If you are combining errands, those are three different parking lots, not one.
The drive is short from most of the Mohawk Valley: Utica is next door, and Whitesboro, Yorkville, Marcy, Clark Mills, Sauquoit and Frankfort are all inside a normal after-school trip. New Hartford Senior High School’s Spartans are essentially local walk-ins. Rome Free Academy students come from the northwest side of Oneida County. The one other formalwear address in the immediate area is MeMe’s, down in Utica at Franklin Square; the Lite 98.7 prom-dress roundup names both shops, and locals treat them as the two in-person options before you start considering Syracuse or Albany.
One note on age: the store’s website calls it a front runner in fashion “for over 73 years,” but no independent record of a founding date turned up, so treat that as the shop’s own account rather than a confirmed year.