The ritual is adorable. Mother and daughter ditch the gentlemen and set out (on the first day of spring, in a blinding Chicago snowstorm) to find a wedding dress.

Only there aren’t any. Not if you think of a wedding dress as something formal, white and ravishing that is suitable to wear on a dignified ceremonial occasion.

My daughter and her nearest available bridesmaid had done the preliminary research of flipping through the five-pound magazines and the jammed racks of a massive wedding franchise. The choice, she reported, was between a peek-a-boo dress, tightly constructed to expose one body part, such as a naked leg or backside cleavage, and an enormous confection of bows, ruffles, tulle and lace that does not attempt to dress the bride so much as to gift wrap her.

So off we went to the higher end of the business. Just off the Magnificent Mile, we found a cluster of lushly carpeted boutiques where we were offered tea in china cups and water in stemmed glasses. Along the walls were open closets in which the neatly spaced lineup of vast off-white triangles, delicately rigged at the top from satin hangers, was pleasantly reminiscent of summertime sail boat races on the horizon of nearby Lake Michigan.

But in four such establishments, we found only two (other) basic choices, although with an infinite number of small variations.

By far the majority were dresses that must have been “inspired,” as designers are wont to say, by the wedding cake: huge at the bottom, where they were elaborately festooned with folds, ribbons or flowers, and slowly narrowing toward a small white circle at the top. This was the strapless bodice, from which the bare bride was to emerge at the half-breast level. When we asked to see something other than strapless, we were shown a small selection of what appeared to be old-fashioned wedding nightgowns: flimsy (but no less costly) straight shifts hanging from fragile bits of ribbon or lace.

Was anyone there familiar with a once-popular design element called the sleeve?

This inquiry brought on a rush of sympathy. What was familiar to them was the occasional draconian clergyman who insists that the bride not appear at his altar looking as if she were making a quick, utilitarian stop on her way to the real business of the evening— partying. To appease this type, the shops carried tiny boleros that could be peeled off the minute reactionary religious approval was no longer necessary.

That the bride herself might want anything other than the now-standard model was not considered. And yet a married niece told us of the dismay her friends experienced when their wedding photographs confronted them with the fact that their dresses looked like everyone else’s — and didn’t even show up in their most formal heads-and-shoulders portraits. One friend of hers had burst into tears when she realized, a bit late, that not all shoulders —hers, for instance— are flattered by total exposure.

Nevertheless, my daughter and I agreed that we had had a charming excursion. Until we got back and the Father of the Bride and the Fiancé of the Bride called out, “Well? Did you find it?”