Call it intermezzo, call it chicken, the altar-bound audience was entranced.

Four young women dressed as brides swayed down a runway set up in the East Ballroom of the Sheraton Universal in Universal City.

Before each model had mounted the stairs for her mock processional, a dress-fluffer had pouffed the skirt and train of her elaborate white gown. As a result, the dreamy-eyed pseudobrides seemed to be dragging huge, strangely fancy parachutes behind them.

The occasion was a recent wedding fashion show and nuptial fair, which attracted about a thousand brides-to-be as well as dozens of future mothers-in-law, best friends and even a few prospective grooms.

This was a relatively small show, according to its impresario, Twyla Martin of Glendale. Martin said she is the nation’s leading organizer of such premarital events. She also did the commentary for the fashion show, observing about one gown that revealed the model’s ankles, “The designer calls it tea length, but I like to call it ‘intermezzo.’ ”

Call it intermezzo, call it chicken, the altar-bound audience was entranced. In a state where more than half the marriages end in divorce, the event was a veritable festival of hope, cheap at twice the $5 admission price.

“Don’t they realize what their chances are?” I whispered to Caroline Chirico of Northridge, a person of mother-of-the-bride age who was staffing J. C. Penney’s wedding-wear booth. “Don’t tell them!” she pleaded.

I held my tongue. But some of the future brides must have known, even if they weren’t letting on. They have costly wedding albums full of pictures of formally attired former mates to remind them.

Twenty-five-year-old Ingrid Wilkerson of Canoga Park is divorced and a nurse. She and Ron Green, 28, plan to marry Sept. 8 at his parents’ home in Sherman Oaks, which should give her time to master the pronunciation of chuppa , as the traditional Jewish wedding canopy is called.

Wilkerson and Green, who has never been married, kissed and laughed a lot during the fashion show, which featured gray tuxes worn with shiny gray shoes that caused men in the audience to whisper disapprovingly.

Perhaps the visibly happy couple were recalling their first meeting, the sort of improbable encounter Frank Capra used to write into his movies, a “cute meet” with a contemporary twist. “We met through my ex-husband,” Wilkerson explained. Green was her ex’s roommate before he was hers.

The likelihood that tomorrow’s typical wedding party will include the mother and father of the bride, their respectives spouses and possibly Dad’s girlfriend didn’t deter the bridal shoppers.

They enthusiastically argued the relative merits of strawberry-custard and chocolate-mousse fillings with the staff of Heidi’s Pastry Shop. Heidi’s wedding-cake display was dominated by an edible extravaganza consisting of nine far-flung cake tiers that housed an entire wedding party of little plastic people and feeds up to 600. Complete with four plastic staircases and a working fountain, it looked like a cross between a complex carbon molecule and a Latin American villa struck by a natural disaster involving tons of runaway butter cream.

Whatever other senses may be piqued by being engaged, it apparently doesn’t heighten your sense of irony. No one snickered audibly when a formal-wear exhibitor advised that the current rage in connubial clothing for men was dressing for your wedding like a Miami vice cop.

“What does that mean exactly?” I asked the exhibitor. “Colors,” he answered. But then nobody laughed last season when the hot look in tuxes was inspired by “Dynasty,” not exactly a training film for a successful marriage either.

The only cynical note at the affair was struck by an exhibitor. She was more than willing to speculate on the comeback of the old-fashioned wedding, if I promised not to identify her. “All these funny little diseases around these days are making people get married,” she said. “They’re making all our businesses boom.”

Unwilling to dwell on the concept of AIDS as matchmaker for the ‘80s, I went from booth to booth, looking for marital trends. I discovered that contemporary brides favor gowns with puffs the size of bowling balls where the sleeves meet the shoulders and bouquets of orchids and lavender-gray roses. It didn’t add up to much, so I asked Twyla Martin what was really happening on the wedding front.

“The trend is toward bigger, more elaborate weddings that are often being paid for by the bride and groom,” she said. More couples are financing their own nuptials because they are marrying later and, thus, tend to be more financially independent, she theorized. The average bride is now 24, she pointed out, the groom 30.

Five years ago, women were first marrying at 19, men at 26. Several couples confirmed that they were footing their own wedding bills and hoped to bring the event in for under $5,000. More than one bride-to-be said that a benefit of self-financing was feeling comfortable about saying no to her mother.

Martin, the bridal-fair lady, confessed that she has never been married in a proper wedding gown, with or without sweetheart collar or bridal buttons down the back. Recalling her last marriage, her third, she reported: “I wore a blue wraparound skirt, a little silk shirt and espadrilles. Tacky, tacky!”

But next year, on her 10th wedding anniversary, her husband has promised her a traditional ceremony, gown and all. “He’s wonderful,” she said, suddenly looking as happy, even starry-eyed, as any woman in the room.