At her high school prom Jamie Barton didn’t have a date. Even her gay best friend wriggled out of it. Yet her parents in Rome, Georgia, were keen for her to join in. “So I went with a group of friends, but they were all split into couples,” the American mezzo-soprano explains. “I was literally the seventh person in a six-person limo, which means I got to sit up front with the driver.” The overall experience was “not great, but I got a pretty dress out of it”.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and Barton has found a Prom, a BBC Prom, where she will be the centre of attention — and where her dress has been designed to make headlines. On Saturday evening she