A costume designer couldn’t believe her eyes when she returned home after 14 years and discovered her prom dress in a thrift store, before buying it back and repurposing it into a stunning modern design.
Having moved back home to Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada, after more than a decade in Toronto, the last thing Jillea expected to find in a local thrift store was her 2010 prom dress.
Jillea and her friends come from such a remote area that they had a group chat at the time, making sure they didn’t buy the same prom dress from one of the local boutiques.
Fortunately for Jillea, though, she stopped off in a shop in Miami while on a cruise and, certain no one else would have a dress like it, picked “a massive, ruffled, sparkly, blue cheetah print dress.”
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The dress was “a lot,” she admitted, but it perfectly reflected her 16-year-old self, and so having purchased the dress, Jillea, at 5’2”, took it home and had it altered to fit her frame.
A local tailor was able to take around two feet off the bottom of the dress – which then played an important part in identifying it more than a decade later.
After her prom, Jillea kept the dress for a few years before selling it online to buy a camera that would help her pursue an arts career.
Years passed before she returned home and headed out to purchase some materials for a costume she was working on.
With the town’s fabric shop now closed down, she decided to head to a local thrift store, where she saw her dress hanging at the end of a rack.
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The shortened length made Jillea sure that it was hers, and seeing the price of $24.99 – not the $800 she previously paid for it – the now 31-year-old decided to buy back her once-beloved garment.
With more than half a million followers on TikTok, Jillea, a popular costume designer and artist, decided to document her journey by giving her dress a new life.
Having recently bought antique blue and white pottery from a shop down the street, she thought that style would be perfect to incorporate into the color and pattern of her dress.
The result was a painted scene from one of the plates, placed inside gold embellishments in the center of the dress.
She said of the find: “My mom and I were giggling and running up to my apartment like no time had passed.
“It zipped with ease and fit perfectly.
“It was embarrassingly emotional: so much time had passed, and I had lived what felt like 40 different lives between putting it on at 16 and putting it on at 30, at the time.
“I was covered in tattoos, my hair was darker, I looked completely different from my prom photos, but I will tell you I felt just as cool in my crazy dress now.
“I spent a good 45 minutes just walking around in it going, ‘Oh this? This ol’ thing? This is just my prom dress that I found after 14 years.
“I knew as soon as I saw it on the rack what its fate was, and that was to become something cool and kickass again.
“I did what no one should do after being reunited with their prom dress, I took scissors and cut it up.
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“I had just bought these beautiful antique blue and white pottery from a consignment shop down the street and I was thinking it kind of looks like the dress, which is where I got the idea to paint the scene from the plate onto the new dress and accent it with gold embellishments.
“I honestly thought, I’m not sure if I’m the only person who thinks this is crazy, but it might be interesting, so I filmed the process and put it online.
“Through all my other videos and all my other designs, this one blew up overnight, bigger than anything else I had done.
“People loved to hear about my dramatic reuniting with the dress, and it was such a positive experience, which made cutting up my dress 100 times easier.
“She’s home, now on permanent display in my studio, so I get to look at her every day, which I think is pretty freaking cool.”
