At the time, Becky was living with a guy she didn't like much anymore. So she bought the dress, took it home, shoved it in a trunk, broke up with her boyfriend and met someone new at a wedding soon afterward. When he asked her to marry him, he wasn't surprised to learn that she already had the dress.

I love this story because it says a lot about Becky. If you knew her, you'd know that all the elements are there: the cause, the coincidence, the steal, the way things sort themselves out on a dime and hurtle toward their inevitable happy conclusion. It also says a lot about the symbolic power of wedding dresses. If your job sucks and your boyfriend's a drag, a wedding dress can look a lot like a ticket to the future.

Of course, it's a purely symbolic ticket. When my great-grandmother was married off to a 36-year-old man by her lunatic mother when she was just 16, her first thought was that she'd finally get a chance to get out of the house and spend her own money. Even my own mother couldn't help but count independence as a factor in her decision to get married. At 23, she had never lived away from her parents' house.

By the time my mom got married, the white wedding dress had already ceased to be a symbol of virginity. Brides were no longer "pure" so much as they were just really, really clean. But even if the old meanings are long lost, bridal gowns continue to wield symbolic power. Brides are characters in a story that people never seem to tire of. And the story is both extremely personal and completely universal.

"One of the things about brides," says Lynn Rosenzweig, who designs bridal gowns with her partner, Ivana Rista, "is that they think they want something different from everybody else, but in the end all brides are the same. It's all about how they want to be perceived on one day of their life."

Seven or eight years ago, it was still difficult for a bride to find a chic and elegant dress that didn't make her look like she was going to be married by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon along with 400 of her closest friends. Rosenzweig and Rista were at the forefront of a revolution in bridal wear that began when Vera Wang went where no self-respecting designer (who was not a good friend of the bride) had ever gone before.

Before opening Ristarose, their San Francisco bridal store, Rosenzweig and her partner were struggling ready-to-wear designers with a shop full of flattering dresses and pants. Around the time when Carolyn Bessette Kennedy caused a sensation in her narrow Narciso Rodriguez sheath, women started coming into the store and ordering narrow evening dresses in white. This was a revelation to the Ristarose partners. "Women were coming in and saying, 'I have to have a wedding dress like this.' And we realized, 'Well, that's exactly what we do.'"

"It had never crossed our minds to do bridal. The whole image of the bridal industry at that time was nasty, poufy dresses. Designers didn't want to be associated with that. And then Vera Wang became really popular in 1994, which is when we started, and then the whole industry started changing." Ristarose made its name creating dresses for what Rosenzweig calls "the rock 'n' roll bride."

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