Kate's wedding dress draws record crowds to Buckingham Palace
(CBS) Kate Middleton's wedding gown was seen around the world when she married Prince William on April 29, and now it's drawn a record number of visitors to Buckingham Palace.
More than 600,000 people bought tickets to see the Duchess of Cambridge's gown, designed by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, while it was on display at the London palace from late July to Oct. 3.
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"We've enjoyed welcoming visitors from all over the world to Buckingham Palace in record numbers this summer - it has been an incredibly busy few months and we're delighted that it's been such a huge success," a spokeswoman for the Royal Collection said, according to The Guardian.
The previous record was 420,000 visitors in 1994. This year's figure is a 50 percent increase from last year's visitor count, reports say.
Palace officials have not yet released a figure for how much money was raised from the exhibit, according to the Telegraph, but adult admission to the palace cost 17.50 pounds (about $27). The paper notes that more was likely spent in the palace gift shops.
Other royal palaces also benefitted from royal wedding fever - Windsor Castle reportedly had 680,000 visitors between April and September, and Edinburgh's Holyroodhouse, the site of Zara Phillips' July royal wedding reception, drew 152,000.
The next destination for Kate's dress, People magazine reports, is storage. A palace source said the duchess is "keen to ensure that the dress survives undamaged for as long as possible, and so this inevitably means limiting the number of times that it is transported or displayed."
