Does it seem odd that most brides begin what's meant to be a lifelong relationship wearing a fragile white dress only once, for four or five hours?

The single-occasion wedding dress, once rarely handed down to a daughter or granddaughter, was dreamed up by the affluent in the late 19th century and popularized for the masses in the 20th century.

For most of past history, a wedding dress was simply the best dress a woman could afford to buy or already owned and was made of virtually any material in any color.

We can thank, or blame, Queen Victoria for the rise of the white wedding dress, says Phyllis Magidson, costume curator at the Museum of the City of New York and caretaker of the museum's large collection of wedding attire and memorabilia.

Queen Victoria was not the first bride to wear white, according to the curator. One of the earliest known references to a white wedding dress appears in 1818 in an English style magazine known as Ackermann's Repository.

But Victoria was the one who popularized the custom when she wore a white satin dress overlaid with Honiton lace, a Honiton lace veil, and a wreath of orange blossoms in her hair for her 1840 wedding to Prince Albert. The dress was illustrated in publications throughout the western world and set a fashion that is recognizable as classic wedding attire even today.

After Victoria's wedding, lace became the most consistent element on late 19th century wedding gowns. Expensive dresses incorporated yards of handmade lace, while less expensive dresses had inset bands or medallions of machine-made lace, Magidson says.

More recent royal connections also have influenced fashion. The dress worn by Wallis Warfield Simpson when she married the Duke of Windsor in 1937 was almost immediately copied, no doubt inspired by her role as "the woman I love" for whom King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne.

Wallis Simpson's simple dress, designed by the American Mainbocher, was suitable for any dressy occasion. One version of the dress was carried by Klein's Cash and Carry on 14th Street in New York City, with an $8.90 price tag.

More recently, the dress that Lady Diana Spencer wore in 1981 for her wedding to Prince Charles inspired numerous copies. It's not likely that later brides walked down the aisle in exact replicas of the bouffant antique white silk taffeta dress with its cathedral-length train. But details were incorporated into many mass market designs.

It takes only months or sometimes even weeks for imitations of dresses worn by noteworthy brides to come onto the market. The slip dress worn by Carolyn Bessette at her wedding John Kennedy in 1996 was followed almost instantly by copies.