Think that the world has had enough of royal wedding fever? Think again.
While exact numbers haven’t been confirmed, a rep for Buckingham Palace has said that more than 600,000 people visited the exhibit held there over the summer (from late July to October 3) to essentially gawk at the wedding dress Kate Middleton wore for her April 29 nuptials to Prince William.
The dress, by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, received rave reviews (including from this site) and the power of the garment is there for all to see: the previous highest figure for visitors to the palace was 420,000 visitors back in 1994. The year before the wedding saw 413,000 enter the legendary location, so this is a rise of roughly 50%. And the exhibit didn’t have the most auspicious of beginnings, as the Queen found the star attraction (the dress, not her granddaughter-in-law) a little unsettling when Kate gave her an early tour.
(PHOTOS: Kate Middleton’s Wedding Dress on Show at Buckingham Palace)
“It is an incredible figure,” a spokeswoman for the Royal Collection (which organizes the annual exhibit) told TIME’s sister publication People. “It is easily a record. We were thrilled to welcome people from all over the world and delighted it has been such a huge success.”
But though everyone said yes to the dress, what next for the vision in white? According to People, who grabbed a word with a palace source, the newly minted Duchess of Cambridge 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.” In other words: it’s destined for storage.
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Glen Levy is an Executive Producer at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @glenjl. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.