Beverly Fisher spent more than a year envisioning her daughter wearing the senior prom dress of their dreams.
For her, it was a goal worthy of hourlong drives from suburban Dolton to Humboldt Park, where she said a designer recommended by her sister-in-law promised to combine the details of three existing dresses into one black, crystallized masterpiece.
Appointment after appointment, deposit after deposit, Fisher said she paid Makeda Evans of Makeda E. Designs $2,200 over the last 14 months.
Now, after the designer repeatedly pushed back the pickup date and then stopped responding altogether, Fisher’s daughter, Emon’ee, will attend senior prom Friday without the dress she paid for.
“She made me feel like I failed my daughter,” Fisher said, detailing moments she dissolved into tears of frustration. “This is one moment they can’t get back.”
Fisher’s experience at Makeda E. Designs is hardly an anomaly.
Scores of people gathered outside Evans’ Pulaski Road design shop Wednesday evening after being told their dresses and suits would be complete, according to a police report obtained by the Tribune.
Each of them said they had already paid for their outfits in full, according to the report. Some of them have proms as soon as this weekend to attend.
When they arrived, witnesses said the doors were locked and Evans stopped answering her phone.
“She obviously wasn’t at the shop,” said Chiquita Hodges, another mother who said her daughter was left without a dress. “Someone said she initially was there, but she barricaded the front doors and she left out the back.”
Attempts by the Tribune to reach Evans for comment Thursday were unsuccessful.
But on Wednesday night, as Hodges watched the crowd grow outside, Evans took to social media informing her Facebook followers she could not complete their dresses because of a “serious mental health crisis.”
Not long after she left, Hodges heard the shop had been broken into. She returned to the store hoping to salvage her daughter’s incomplete dress, but she wasn’t able to find it among other dresses scattered on the sidewalk.
Area 5 detectives are investigating the matter as a deceptive practice or fraud, according to the police report.
This wasn’t the first time Evans has been accused of shirking her obligations.
According to Cook County Court records, a former customer filed a small claims complaint against her in 2023 after she did not receive her wedding dress on time. A Cook County judge ordered Evans to pay the woman $3,000. That same year, Evans posted on Facebook saying “four young ladies didn’t receive their (prom) dresses and a few others experienced dilemmas” as she suffered from exhaustion and sleep deprivation.
Just last week, 18-year-old Teriyana Gage said she waited as long as she possibly could before giving up on Evans.
A senior at Rowe-Clark Math & Science Academy in West Humboldt Park, Gage grew worried when her dress pickup was further and further delayed the week of her May 8 prom.
Evans’ promises of a Sunday completion became Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Thursday, she said. Before she knew it, Gage was sitting in the shop at 1 a.m. the night before her prom, waiting for the dress to be done.
When Evans told her she needed a bit more time, Gage said she and her mother agreed to return the next day at 1 p.m., just hours before she needed to leave. By then, it still wasn’t complete.
“I’m like I’ll go to prom in an hour and I don’t have no dress, no nothing,” Gage said. “Am I just gonna miss my big day?”
Ultimately, Gage’s mother found her another dress to wear to the prom. But when the family asked for a refund, Evans told them she did not have the money to provide them with one, Gage said.
For Hodges, the Austin neighborhood mother, Wednesday’s incident was the end of a lengthy, but fruitless attempt to provide her daughter the perfect dress.
Having “never seen anything negative” about the popular dressmaker online before she began working with her, Hodges described it as feeling like a “dream come true” when she scheduled the first appointment back in July.
Her daughter, Chanaiya, has always been an honor roll student at Dunbar Vocational Career Academy High School in Bronzeville and Hodges felt passionately about ensuring she could wear the dress she earned through hard work and academic success.
Despite a few early bumps in the road, such as the dress’s corset top not fitting right, Hodges said the design process went well for a while. But toward the end, the quality declined. Evans hadn’t made the adjustments she promised, Hodges said.
Fisher, who began the process of acquiring her daughter’s dress even earlier than Hodges had, described the same thing. Following many extensive conversations about hopes and expectations, at the final fitting Fisher’s daughter told Evans the dress was “ugly” when it appeared she had put it together at the last minute and “cut a bra in half” to design the top.
“It looked like it came off of Temu, it didn’t look nothing like what we paid for,” Fisher said.
After delaying the pickup date a few times this month, Hodges said Evans sent a “generic” text she believed was sent to more people than just her Monday.
“Due to the unexpected volume of online attention, threats and individuals arriving at the shop, we are making temporary adjustments to pickup scheduling,” the text read, adding she could pick up the dress on Tuesday or Wednesday, without providing a specific time.
Following the controversy surrounding Evans and her customers, many sympathetic Chicagoans offered to donate their dresses to those who need them. Evans said she was “committed to working things out” with each of her clients in the Wednesday evening Facebook post.
Still hoping to give her daughter a prom dress to remember, Hodges paid another designer $2,500 to customize a new dress. All told, she said she spent $4,700.
“From the time they start school, from kindergarten, we envision this moment,” she said. “And for it to be taken away from us, it’s crazy.”
