Last-minute shoppers on the hunt for the perfect party dress are finding themselves dazzled by sequins and enchanted by frills, often falling prey to scams and misleading AI-generated images of outfits that don’t actually exist.

Even well-known figures aren’t exempt from these pitfalls. Actress Melissa Joan Hart, 49, recently took to Instagram to share her disappointment over a festive dress that fell short of her expectations.

The Sabrina The Teenage Witch star posted a photo of the dress she thought she had ordered, featuring a plunging neckline and intricate embroidery of gold Christmas trees adorning the skirt, complete with 3D flowers around the waist and bodice.

However, the reality was starkly different. The second photo revealed the actual dress she received, which was a far cry from the sophisticated and embellished garment she had anticipated.

While the dress maintained a red and green color scheme, it lacked any embroidered or 3D details. Instead, these elements were merely printed onto a simple, low-quality long-sleeved dress with a skater-style skirt.

The dress also did not have the flared sleeves that were featured in the advert, nor the tailored bodice and twirly skirt the image promised.

In her caption, Melissa wrote: ‘What I ordered… what I received! Online ordering sucks! Going rogue for my fancy ugly sweater look this year now. PS this looks better in the photo than it does in person.’

Some fans found the whole saga ‘hilarious’, with one commenting: ‘Now friend, I know you know that picture was AI.’

Another added: ‘Honestly that one’s on you Melissa.’

A third wrote: ‘I’m laughing so hard!! But I totally sympathise, because online ordering DOES suck!’

Several people admitted to falling victim to similar fake fashion sales, with one person confessing: ‘This happened to me, too! I ordered a rug from some website and what came was a horrible “print” of the wool rug, some polyester garbage.

‘Don’t ever order anything from any site that you have never heard of. Lesson learned.’

Social media is filled with other examples of people who have been scammed while ordering clothes online, after being led to believe they were purchasing a beautiful, intricate gown but receiving something very different indeed.

Birds of a feather

In 2022, Edinburgh-based Rachel Brown spotted a ‘once in a lifetime’ gown on a Facebook advert that she found irresistible.

In the advert, the dress featured an elaborately beaded bodice and sleeves and a fine feather-festooned skirt with a sexy thigh split.

Rachel told Edinburgh Live that the dress had been reduced in price to around £90, a bargain she found too good to ignore.

However, she experienced buyer’s regret and began to wonder if the website was a scam after entering her PayPal details.

She told the publication: ‘When I ordered it, I don’t know what it was but I had a sinking feeling the minute I ordered it that something wasn’t right.’

After doing some research and discovering numerous complaints about the website the dress was from, Rachel contacted PayPal for a refund, which was issued.

However, while she assumed the dress would never turn up since she had asked for a refund, Rachel was surprised to see it delivered to her door a few days later – except it looked miles away from what had been advertised to her.

The actual dress featured a mesh bodice and sleeves with cheap plastic silver sequins instead of the intricate beading she had expected, whilst the skirt had rows of short feathery material stuck to the front of it.

On the back of the skirt, there were no feathers at all and the front rows could be seen jutting out of the sides.

Rachel said the skirt was ‘moulting those feather things all over my hall’ and it ‘doesn’t even cover everything’.

However, she found the funny side to the experience and shared it on Facebook, where it gained ‘hundreds of likes’.

Boho chic? More like boo-hoo chic

 A Reddit thread dedicated to online shopping fails has plenty of examples of people who have been duped by fake listings, including this shopper who thought they were getting a trendy boho chic top.

Reddit user @Sidewayscaca shared an image of a beautiful green and purple ombre long-sleeved top with embroidered flower details around the neckline and bottom half.

The top also featured lace details on the body and upper sleeves, as well as drapey sleeves with intricate cuffs.

However, another photo showed a completely different garment to what was advertised in the listing.

The top they received was more of a tunic, but was also a completely different colour and did not feature any of the embroidered details that the original listing had promised.

It was blue and pink ombre instead, and the floral patterns were printed onto the flat garment, which did not flatter or appear well-made at all.

The author of the post wrote in his caption: ‘If Wish and Temu were siblings and had a baby!’

They added in frustration: ‘Look at this s***!’

Not-so-Pretty Little Thing

Shopping for clothes from PrettyLittleThing can be hit or miss in terms of fit, but one woman did not expect her brand new dress to look quite as bad as it did.

Isla Garrigan, from Durham, spent £30 on what she thought was a baby pink skater dress with a pretty tiered skirt, a mock neck and long sleeves from the retailer on 2018.

So it was quite the shock when Isla, 19 at the time, opened her parcel only to find a dress that did not meet her expectations at all.

Instead of a light baby pink, the dress that arrived was a brighter, rather unflattering shade of fleshy bubblegum pink.

But it also was not well-fitting, with shoulder pads that made Isla appear much wider and boxier on top than she really was and a waistband that was much higher than the listing photo had suggested.

The waistband appeared immediately under Isla’s bust rather than at her waist, and the skirt tiers were an unflattering length and volume.

Isla told The Mirror that she felt as though she was ‘dressed for an old horror film or like [US President] Donald Trump’s First Lady [Melania Trump].’ 

She also shared a photo of the ugly dress on Facebook, adding that it needed ‘burning’ and that she planned to be ‘so careful’ when shopping with the brand in future. 

Lost spark-le

A woman in Germany knew she was taking a risk when she ordered a stunning dress that appeared to be encrusted with sparkling gems online, but nothing could prepare her for how terrible the real garment would be.

Evita Herhardt began a series on TikTok last year, in which she purposely ordered dresses designed with AI online to see what would actually arrive on her doorstep.

One dress in particular really took the cake when it eventually landed in her hands. 

In her TikTok video, Evita showed an image of the dress on her phone, which appeared to be a breathtaking gown covered in sparkling gems, with a sheer, drapey skirt and cutout details around the neck and shoulder. 

However, as she pulled her phone away from the camera, Evita revealed the true horror show of a dress that actually arrived.

She posed in the garment, which consisted of a thin fabric covered in a strange, speckly print that was apparently meant to resemble sparkles.

The dress was even printed nude where the cutouts were meant to be, and the skirt was cut so far up in a bizarre asymmetrical way that Evita had to wear shorts underneath to protect her modesty.

‘This is absolute madness,’ she wrote in the caption with cry-laughing emojis, bemused by just how awful the dress was. 

Fans were equally flabbergasted, with one person commenting: ‘It’s like they sent you a drawing of the picture of the dress.’

Others joked that the seller had sent her the curtains behind the fake model in the image instead of the dress itself, while others could only laugh at how bad the resulting dress was.

Cringe in a cape

In 2023, the mother of a bride in New Zealand thought she had purchased a beautiful beaded green dress with a long, flowing cape to wear to her daughter’s wedding.

But the reality was far from dazzling, as Morgan Tracy, the bride-to-be at the time, revealed in a TikTok video.

The photograph of the dress that Morgan’s mother thought she was buying showed a truly stunning gown with a plunging neckline and intricate beading around the shoulders and waist.

The rest of the gown also appeared to feature beading all down the length of the skirt and the cape, giving the illusion of height and grandeur – no doubt a dress she thought would be suitable for such a wonderful occasion as her daughter’s wedding.

But the fantastical image cuts to the stark reality or Morgan filming herself in front of a full-length mirror wearing the dress that actually arrived in the post.

It had the plunging neckline and cape that the image promised, but the similarities stop there.

The maxi dress was devoid of any real embellishments, with diamond and sparkle motifs simply printed onto a cheap blue fabric.

The cape was also printed with the same ugly pattern.

‘The worst dress I’ve ever seen,’ Morgan wrote. ‘I am shooketh.’

She revealed in the comments that her mother had been planning to wear the dress to her wedding, but that they would have to find her something else. 

No eagle eyes here 

A TikTok user who goes by the handle @abigafchicy sent viewers into hysterics after she shared how she fell for a fake AI image – a costly mistake that set her back nearly US$2,000, she said.

The content creator shared the image of the dress she thought she had ordered online, which featured a very imaginatively designed dress that used eagles as its main motif.

The bust of the dress appeared to have been inspired by two eagles facing one another, with their bedazzled feathers extending out beyond into the bodice, skirt, shoulders and sleeves of the dress.

While it may seem obvious that the image was AI-generated, the TikToker was completely enamoured by the dress and parted ways with a hefty sum for it.

But in the next clip, she showed the reality of the dress which was significantly less majestic than she had hoped.

Whilst the gown did have most of the elements shown in the AI image, such as the eagle head motifs and 3D feathers bursting from her shoulders, the actual construction and design left much to be desired.

The eagles looked goofy rather than awe-inspiring and more closely resembled a pair of seagulls.

The black and white feathers appeared to have simply been tacked onto the dress in a vague pattern, whilst the larger 3D feathers jutted out at strange angles.

As she turned around, it became evident that the dress wasn’t even the correct size and she could not do up the corset closure on the back.

Viewers found the video highly amusing, with people joking that the birds looked ‘dead’ and wondering why she ordered the gown in the first place.

‘Considering it’s an AI dress, I’m surprised they didn’t just send it as a poster,’ one person said.

Another added: ‘This is on you because it’s CLEARLY AI-generated.’