The family has been selling dresses in South Philadelphia since 1946, when Jennie and Louis Zinni opened on South 12th Street. Their daughter Carolyn grew up in that store. When her parents closed the city shop, she took a $100,000 loan from her father and opened Zinni’s of Philadelphia out on Baltimore Pike in Springfield, Delaware County — a move that bought her the one thing the old neighborhood could not offer, which was parking. Twenty-five spaces in front, seventy-five in back.
The Delaware County store ran on prom. Interviewed by the Inquirer at the start of the 2016 season, Zinni said proms accounted for about 70 percent of sales, and that the shop had sold 780 prom dresses the previous season at an average of $450 each. That store is closed. She is back in Philadelphia now, on the 1700 block of East Passyunk Avenue, a few blocks from where the whole thing started.
The salon leads with bridal — the collections page lists Sophia Tolli, Martin Thornburg, Lotus Threads and Tarik Ediz White — but the special-occasion side of the business is the part that matters if you are shopping for a dance:
- Jovani — the volume name in American prom; the store appears on Jovani’s own retailer list.
- MNM Couture — evening and pageant-leaning silhouettes.
- Tarik Ediz — made in the designer’s Istanbul atelier, and the label the shop puts on its own front page.
Homecoming gets its own push: the East Passyunk business district has listed a September homecoming-dress event at the store. And Zinni has kept up a giveaway she started at the Springfield shop roughly seventeen years earlier — in the year CBS3 covered it, she gave away 89 prom gowns to families in South Philadelphia at no cost.
Before you go
This is an appointment shop, not a walk-in floor. Requests go through the website, or call (215) 468-5000 first. Going in cold on a Saturday in April is how you end up standing on the sidewalk.
The address is 1725 E. Passyunk Ave., 19148. East Passyunk (locals say “pah-shunk”) cuts diagonally across the street grid, and the 1700 block sits in the restaurant stretch southwest of the Singing Fountain at 11th — Barcelona Wine Bar is at 1709, Marra’s is on the same block, and Pat’s and Geno’s are down the avenue at 9th and Wharton. Parking is street parking, and it is tight. The Broad Street Line runs a few blocks west if you would rather not circle.
Who shops here
Neumann-Goretti is the closest school by a wide margin: 1736 S. 10th St., same ZIP code, a walk of a few blocks. South Philadelphia High School is up on South Broad. Furness, the Girard Academic Music Program and the charters in the area all pull from the same rowhouse blocks, plus the South Philly kids who commute to the citywide magnets and come home to shop where their mothers did.
That last part is the actual argument for this store. Philadelphia has no shortage of prom racks — the malls in Delaware County and the shops on Chestnut Street are all inside an hour. What is here instead is one person who has been dressing women in this neighborhood her whole working life, in a room where she is the one pulling the dresses.