From £12 to £1,000: how much is a prom dress really worth?

It is the time of year when dress shops up and down the country are inundated with teenagers seeking the picture-perfect outfit for their school prom. But how much should families spend? The BBC spoke to some prom-goers who had splashed out hundreds on a dress – and others who were happy to bag a bargain.

A myriad of regal colours, rhinestones, sequins, sparkles and diamante material catches the eyes of customers as they walk into a shop in Goole, East Yorkshire.

About 70 lavish dresses and tailored suits hang on rails, ready for this year's prom season.

Manager Amy Raggett pulls out one of the dresses. It is black, with pretty embellishments.

But the price tag, some will think, is even prettier. At just £12.95, this prom dress costs a fraction of the price being charged at some of the area's boutiques, where outfits can go for upwards of £1,000.

For this is a charity shop run by Dove House – a Hull-based hospice – and staff here have been collecting and storing the "new but used" dresses ready for "the right time". That time is now.

"Prom dresses nowadays are just so expensive, hundreds sometimes thousands of pounds," says Amy, as she runs her fingers across the rail.

"Prom is just one day. It's one day of your childhood life, and these dresses give families another option.

"I know I wouldn't fit in my prom dress that I wore 15 years ago," she adds with a laugh.

Proms have long been known as an American rite of passage marking the end of school, but until a few decades ago, their impact on the UK was largely confined to films such as Grease, Mean Girls and High School Musical.

Now, the British Council – a public body promoting educational opportunities internationally – estimates about 85% of secondary schools have proms.

And it does not take long on social media to find teenage influencers, some with millions of followers, posting videos promoting a glitzy vision of proms, with expensive dresses, elaborate hair styles and make-up, and hired limousines or sports cars.

In Scunthorpe, Scarlett Robinson, an 18-year-old college student, says she made amazing memories at her school prom.

"It's fun, you get to go see all your mates and make memories. It's the last day of school.

"My dress alone was £800," she adds. "Very expensive, but worth it."

Scarlett does acknowledge, however, that she has not worn the dress since that day. It is currently hung up in her wardrobe.

Fellow 18-year-old Leandro Martins Dos Santos says many of his friends spent "a fortune" on getting dressed up, but his outlay was modest.

"One girl spent a grand and a half on her dress and rented out a car," he adds. "I just didn't see the point of spending a lot of money on a suit I was only going to wear for a day."

Sophie Simpson, also 18 and from Barton-upon-Humber, says she tries her dress on each year to see if it still fits, following her prom in Year 11.

"Overall, prom cost me about £200, so not much really," she says. "It was a great experience. I would definitely recommend it to anyone."

At her dress shop in Scunthorpe, Wendy Ashton says proms have "changed enormously" over the past 20 years.

These days, she keeps "prom books" and has a policy of one of each dress per school.

"I think it's everybody's greatest fear, turning up to an event and somebody having the same outfit," she says. "We keep a really, really strict register."

Upstairs, there are dozens of dresses covered in plastic wraps. Yellow is a popular colour this year, along with baby pinks and blues.

The most expensive is priced £899, according to the store's website. But Wendy also has a rail with "more affordable" dresses, starting at about £100, and says she donated about 60 outfits to schools to offer to disadvantaged students last year.

"I think we've had to be more mindful of how circumstances have changed, particularly of late.

"We try and have a good price range here, starting from lower price points right up to the people who are happy to pay hundreds and hundreds of pounds for their dress.

"A couple of our designers have brought out lower-priced collections this year."

It is a similar picture at other dress shops in the region. Down the road at Red Carpet Ready, near Lincoln, outfits range in price from £50 up to £1,450, according to its website.

Back at the Dove House shop in Goole, Amy says many of the dresses they have in stock have probably only been worn once.

She hopes that by offering them for sale here, it can help take "a big pressure" off families who might otherwise struggle to afford them.

"For the sake of just a day, when you could be spending £25 or £30, why would you want to spend hundreds?

"You could definitely have a ball in these dresses."