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All day long, the bride posed and strutted and sashayed. It was now time to choose. Two contenders remained: diamond white or stark white. She couldn't decide. So she did what most brides do. She left the last call to her maid of honour.

"She tried one on and I just said, 'Sure, that looks good,' " the maid recalls. "I'm really not much of a dress expert."

Diamond white it was.

If the maid's terse couture critique sounds in some way, well, masculine, that's because this maid was a man.

One of the last bastions of gender segregation, the wedding altar, has surrendered to the whims of a world under blurred gender roles.

A sea-foam dress may interrupt a row of groomsmen's tuxes. A line of bridesmaid shawls may include a bow tie or two.

Nearly one in 10 modern wedding parties showcase unconventional gender choices, according to popular wedding site Theknot.com.

But most incongruous of all may be the guy directly to the bride's left: the dude of honour.

And he's finding himself picking out dresses, holding the bride's train and making bachelorette party arrangements - phallic cakes and all.

"It was more work than my own wedding," says Brampton, Ont.-born engineer Paul Thistle, 39, maid of honour and brother of the bride.

"When I got married, it was more like tell me what to wear and where to show up."

He and his kind have become popular enough to garner many titles: man-maid, man of honour, bridesman, patron of honour.

"We actually call them honour attendants," says Anna Post, wedding expert and great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, the etiquette matron.

The practice has even spawned a feature movie: Patrick Dempsey, Dr. McDreamy on television's Grey's Anatomy, is set to star in Made of Honor, about a man whose female love interest asks him to be her maid of honour.

It wasn't so long ago that tastemakers would have scoffed at such role reversals. "People would have had fainting spells," Ms. Post says. "Mixing it up would have pulled too much attention away from the couple."

Today, however, some wedding planners actually encourage brides to choose a dude of honour. They say that the bride's joy, and not honouring stolid traditions, should be paramount on the big day.

In June of last year, Paul McIntyre Royston, a happily married development officer at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and man of honour for his college classmate Nadia Ursacki, planned a bachelorette night out in Kitchener.

The night included stops for male strippers and a drag show at a gay bar. He knew he'd succeeded when he found himself watching the bride-to-be's mother swaying onstage amid a procession of drag queens.

Before the night was over, he'd sipped a few drinks through a phallic straw and had a slice of a phallic cake. "That was definitely my first taste of penis cake," Mr. McIntyre Royston says. "The whole night was a real eye-opener."

Most polite man-maids bow out of helping the bride into her dress the morning of, though there are exceptions. "I can see that in the case of the most fabulously gay honour attendant, this might be okay," Ms. Post says.

So it was when book editor Sarah Knight, 28, chose her best friend Judd Harris to be her man of honour. Mr. Harris not only held the ring, clutched the bouquet and planned the shower, but also spent wedding eve in the bridal suite. "He would have worn a dress for me if I'd asked," Ms. Knight says.

At the ceremony itself, tradition becomes harder to defy.

Most men of honour agree to straighten the bride's train, hold her bouquet and pass her the ring. Mr. McIntyre Royston went one step further, obliging a traditional dance with the best man. "I would say that was the first time I formally danced with a man," he says.

Not everybody is so eager for an end to gender segregation at weddings. A recent Emily Post Institute poll found that 40 per cent of U.S. respondents disapproved of men crossing the altar to the bridal party.

Ms. Knight's future mother-in-law wasn't so pleased with her choice. She was backing one of her daughters for the role.

"I'm one of these women who don't get along well with other women," Ms. Knight says. "Why would I choose a woman?"

Journalist Katie Kolt, 23, came up against a similarly conservative mother-in-law when she chose her brother, Tony, to stand up with her when she weds in July. "She told me flat out that I must have a female," Ms. Kolt says. "I told her it wasn't up for discussion."

As with any wedding wrinkle, there's a question of style to consider.

The first words out of Mr. Thistle's mouth after his sister, Sherri Muehlbacher, asked him to be her maid were, "Do I have to wear a red dress?"

In a word, no. Most men of honour opt for a tuxedo similar to the groomsmen's.

Ms. Post encourages them to wear a distinguishable corsage.

But the rebel brides who select man-maids aren't the types who take well to decorum advice.

"A lot of people still follow the old Emily Post rules," Ms. Muehlbacher says. "Not me. It was my day. I waited a long time to get married and everyone else be damned."