Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Megan Hostetter selects a dress from a rack of used gowns during the Cinderella's Closet sale at Bride's House and Formals.

Girls and their moms scour racks for recycled fashions at Bride's House and Formals, which hosted the Northside High School PTSA sale.

Eager to snatch up bargains, girls and their moms flood into Bride's House and Formals in Roanoke. Northside High School's PTSA and the shop organized an event for girls to buy and sell dresses.

Holly Hinshelwood, 18 (left) and Amber Bennington, 15, line up at Bride's House and Formals before the sale of used gowns begins.

Eager to snatch up bargains, girls and their moms flood into Bride's House and Formals in Roanoke. Northside High School's PTSA and the shop organized an event for girls to buy and sell dresses.

So there were the gowns, a rainbow frolic of sequins and beads, lace and ruffles, on-the-shoulder, off-the-shoulder, long skirts and short.

And there were the prices, ranging from merely good deals downward to the most subterranean of bargain-basement discounts.

And there were the customers, who started lining up Saturday morning for Cinderella's Closet, a one-day sale of hundreds of gently used formal dresses held by the Northside High School Parent-Teacher-Student Association.

From morning into the afternoon, Bride's House and Formals on Peters Creek Road was busy with budget-hunting, homecoming- and prom-minded girls and their mothers -- with an occasional dad or brother along for the ride. The latter contingent looked a bit puzzled, perhaps, but that was OK: This event wasn't really aimed at them.

"It's definitely a girl thing," confirmed organizer Kay Hambrick of the PTSA, watching as gown-seekers combed through the racks, flicking the hangers, ooh-ing and ah-ing, sometimes holding a dress up for a more critical inspection or for someone else to exclaim over.

Intended both as a fundraiser for Northside's PTSA-organized after-prom party in the spring and as a less-expensive route toward finding the perfect outfit, Cinderella's Closet was set up to be a win-win-win-win.

First, customers were able to find outfits for significantly less than if they bought them new. Prices ranged from $10 up to probably $200 per gown, Hambrick said. Second, the PTSA collected a $5 fee for each of the more than 500 dresses that people brought in for sale. Third, proceeds from the sales went back to the person who brought the dress in, allowing some participants to buy this year's dance-wear with money from the sale of a previous year's frock.

And finally, some shoppers turned to a new dress after all, bringing Bride's House a bit of business amid the sale, store owner Janet Lester said.

Lester said she'd been delighted to offer her store as a site for the event and hoped to be part of future sales. The mother of three girls, Lester said she knew well the trials of finding the right gown for a dance and hoped Cinderella's Closet would make the task easier. Laughing, she said she recognized many of the dresses as ones Bride's House had sold originally.

Saying she knew it sounded cliche, Lester said the day's high point was "to see the girls' faces when they put on the dress they want."

Kimber Hughes, a senior at Patrick Henry High School, and Hannah Hollins, a senior at William Byrd High School, critically studied a long, pink dress with rows of pleats and lines of crystalline beads. "This looks like something my mom would wear back in the '70s," Hughes said. "I can definitely see her rocking that."

Hughes had three dresses she planned to try on, including one covered in a vertigo-inducing mix of multicolor stripes, polka dots and flower prints. "That's the in thing. That's what all the girls wear," Hughes said, grinning.

Megan Hostetter, a senior at Glenvar High School, said she tried on eight dresses before choosing a short purple one to wear to Glenvar's Oct. 17 homecoming. The price was $40, probably about one-fourth of what it would cost new, she said.

Better yet, she recognized the name on the dress's tag -- it had been put up for sale by her good friend Dawn Harris, also a Glenvar senior. She thought she remembered Harris wearing the dress to a dance their freshman year.

"We're going to homecoming together so it's going to be pretty funny," Hostetter said.

Angela Osborne, 27, of Roanoke was shopping for her niece Taylor Thomas, a senior at Northside. Osborne had come to Bride's House to pay for the veil she will wear in her own wedding later this year, not realizing the Cinderella's Closet event would be going on. But describing herself as a lifelong bargain hunter -- "I didn't watch cartoons as a child, I watched QVC," Osborne said -- she quickly swung into action.

Osborne said she found a prom dress for Thomas last year, trekking to Charlotte, N.C., to get one on sale. On Saturday, with far less travel, she was able to snag a black-and-white dress that she thought would be perfect for Northside's Oct. 10 homecoming dance.

The event echoed a sale held by Cave Spring High School in 2005. Hambrick and other organizers said that as far as they knew, the Cinderella's Closet sale was the first one of its kind held by the Northside PTSA. But with all the interest Saturday, they hoped to make it an annual, maybe even twice-yearly, event. And customers had told them that next time, it would have to last longer than one day.

"They didn't feel like they had enough time to shop," Hambrick said.