It's a strangely exotic lexicon, the litany of wedding dress colours. And expensive-sounding. Hearing these colours incanted, you could be mistaken for thinking they came from either a restaurant menu - champagne, oyster, cream; or a jewellers' catalogue - gold, pearl, ivory. A visit to the bridal boutique on the third floor of Brown Thomas in Dublin is to experience a peculiar and unexpected sense of deja vu. Rails of satin, silk and lace dresses, veils of net and tulle, racks of pearl and diamante tiaras, daughters in twirling skirts, watched by admiring mothers. But it's not springtime First Communions, it's the year-round business of wedding dresses. No matter how high-tech and sophisticated our society continues to become, the romantic wish for a special wedding dress remains constant. When does it begin, this wishing? And when did women start wearing elaborate dresses, when many of our grandmothers wore simple woollen suits or their Sunday best? The fact that there is more disposable income around these days might well have something to do with it.
Sarah-Jane Villiers Rafferty (25), from Tinahely, Co Wicklow, is getting married next June. She sees her prospective wedding dress as "a dress for the day", rather than something which can be worn several times, as used to be the trend. "I wouldn't be buying it with the intention of wearing it again."
Eight-year-old Sarah Corcoran of Dunmore, Co Galway, is certain she'll be wearing a wedding dress.
"It'll be long," she says. "With long sleeves. I want it to stick out, but only a little bit - like my Communion dress. And you know the bit that goes from the tummy up to the neck? On that part I want a design of diamonds." Where did she get this image from? "I saw it in a magazine." Was it white? "Of course it was white!"
Laura Buckley, originally from Cork and now working as an architect in Dublin, got married in 1992. What she wore sounds like Sarah Corcoran's perfect dress. It was long, white, and full-skirted, with a beaded bodice. She had it made and the total cost was £300.
"I wore my mother's cut-down wedding dress for my Communion and I always wanted a new dress for my wedding as a result." Laura sold it after the wedding for £120. "It wasn't an heirloom dress," she explains. "And I have enough memories of the day, I don't need a dress to remind me of it."
Would she wear the same dress now? "No. I'd have something much simpler." Elva Crowley is a comedian and singer, living in Dublin. She got married in 1995 in an aqua-blue ball-dress, made of silk organza. "I didn't want to wear white or look like a meringue. I'd been living with my partner for years and white didn't seem appropriate, with all the associated symbolism. Besides," she adds pragmatically, "white doesn't suit me."
Her designer dress was bought from a vintage clothing shop and then altered, for a total cost of £250. She still loves it and hopes to wear it again if a formal occasion turns up. "It was the perfect dress for me." The most expensive dress currently on show in Brown Thomas is one in ivory ribbon lace, for £1,195. According to Helen Mullins, who works there, gold is now their most popular colour.
"People have moved on from the peaches-and-cream look," she says. "There are two types of people who come in here. Girls browsing on their own and girls back for the second time, with mothers, friends or sisters." Unlike that other bastion of the female sex, lingerie departments, men are not frequent visitors.
In the bridal room is Dublin-born Lynda Flanagan (27). She is marrying next July and has returned to the shop to show her family what she is considering buying.
"Originally I wanted something traditional - white dress, wide skirts, the whole thing. The sort of dress I pictured as a little girl. Now I want something more mature: gothic and glamorous." She pirouettes around the room in a pillar of gold lace, admired by her retinue of mother, sister and aunt. Her ceiling price is £800. If she buys this dress, she plans to alter it and turn it into an evening dress. Will her fiance see it beforehand? "No way."
Tipperary-based Mide Gerrard was married in 1969. "All my life I had wanted to wear a red velvet dress for my wedding. And I wanted my dress to swish." What she actually wore was a long white silk dress, with puffed sleeves, which she had made for £50.
"It's so difficult now to imagine that I wore it," she marvels. She wore white because "it was what everyone did then. To wear red would have been out of the question." The wedding dress remained in her mother's house until a neighbour's debs dance came up. Her mother remade the dress as a debs dress. "I was glad it had another life."
Heather Hughes is Australian and settled in Mullingar after her wedding in 1954. She had wanted to make her own dress, but in the flurry of emigration, there wasn't time. She ended up buying a white long-sleeved dress, with beaded flowers worked on its full skirt. "No, it wasn't what I really wanted to wear," she says, still wistful about it four decades later. "But I kept the pattern for the dress I had wanted to make, and later, I made it for my sister-in-law. So she was the one who wore my ideal wedding dress." What happened her own dress? "It's here in the wardrobe, rolled up. I kept it because I thought one of my daughters would wear it, but none of them did. Maybe one of the grandchildren will."
During the war years, white weddings were unusual, according to Edna White. Donegal-born, she married in 1943 and now lives in Dublin. "It would have been a sign of ostentatiousness." She says that when women wore white at that time, their grooms were then obliged to wear formal dress. She wore a long blue crepe dress which was beaded. "I don't think I would have worn white even if it had been widely available," she says. "I was slightly lefty even then."
What happened the blue dress? "Oh, God knows!" She pauses to think and then admits laughingly: "I haven't seen it for over 50 years."