This Is The Most Poignant Prom Dress, Ever

Memorials take myriad forms. This prom season, a group of high schoolers is using a prom dress to keep the memory of their late friend alive. Catherine Malatesta, a high school junior, died last August, less than three months after attending her junior prom in a blue gown. (She had first told her mom about the dress while waiting in the ER.) This spring, four of Malatesta's friends will wear the same dress to their proms. They'll become, as Malatesta's mother dubbed them, "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Prom Dress." “I think that prom was a very special time for Catherine last year, with everything she was going through,” Carly Blau, the last of the squad to wear the prom dress, told The Boston Globe.“By wearing her dress, it’s a way to connect with her, and have some closure and shine as bright as she did at prom." Since the dress doesn't, alas, have the same magical, size-shifting powers as "the pants," the dress will be altered to fit each girl as their dances come up. Last Friday, Jillian Danton became the first friend to wear the dress to her own prom. Up next is Emma Schambers: "It’s a very important thing to capture [Catherine's] memory, because prom was a very special time for her," Schambers told The Epoch Times. "She told her mom it was the first time in a long time that she felt beautiful inside and out.”