A letter from a reader

At 65, I arrived at my nephew's wedding and went straight to the ladies to take off what I had spent forty minutes getting into.

You should picture me writing this at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold beside me, because that is exactly how slowly it has come. I am not a writer, and what another woman wears under her dress has never been any of my business.

But three different women have asked me about this dress since the last one, two of them at the same table, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with Carol, my sister, outside the ladies at the reception. I had been in the car for fifty minutes, I had come in, I had said hello to four people, and then I had gone straight down the corridor. She followed me in. She found me standing there with the thing rolled down around my knees and my dress hitched up over one arm, and she stood in the doorway and said it.

You have bought a beautiful dress, Maggie, and then paid extra for something to suffer in underneath it.

I laughed, because you have to, and then I stood there with it around my knees and she was right. Twenty years of it. Not one dress bought on its own. Every single one bought with the quiet understanding that there would be a second thing, in a smaller size, that went on first and that I would think about all evening.

I did not decide to get dressed in two layers for every occasion of my adult life. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one dress at a time, until one day you are standing in a function room at half past six with your sister in the doorway.

How it happens

When I actually went looking for a dress that did not need an accomplice, I understood how I had ended up with a drawer full of them.

The shops sell you the dress and the solution separately. The dress is cut flat, in a fabric that shows every single thing, and it is held up next to the mirror with the words it just needs the right foundation underneath. And then, three aisles over, they sell you the foundation.

Beautiful and unwearable, or comfortable and shapeless. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want a dress that had been cut with a real body already in mind.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the dress. You buy the second thing. You put forty minutes aside. And you assume that is simply what getting dressed for an evening is.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect I am not alone.

I thought my problem was me. Every time a dress was unkind I bought a firmer thing to go underneath it, and the firmer thing made the evening worse.

It turns out it was never about me at all.

It is about whether the dress is doing any of the work. Fabric gathered and ruched across the front, pulled diagonally towards one hip, so there is no flat panel anywhere and the waist is marked where it gathers. The moment that is true, the dress is the shaping, and there is nothing to put on underneath it, and nothing to take off in a corridor.

It took me until 65, and forty minutes I will not get back, to work that out.

The dress is called the Jilliann

It is from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. Carol found them, which she reminds me of regularly.

The dress is called the Jilliann. A floor-length evening dress in a soft, light fabric that moves, with a draped cowl across the front and cap sleeves that sit over the tops of the arms. Mine is the navy. It comes in six colours, which I will come back to.

The ruching is the part that matters. It is fine, and it gathers diagonally across the middle towards one hip, so there is no flat panel anywhere for anything to press against, and where it gathers it marks the waist. The cowl drapes across the collarbone rather than sitting tight at the throat, which is a kinder shape at my age than a round neck. And from the hip the skirt simply opens and goes down, so you move and it moves after you.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just a dress cut by somebody who has stood in a corridor at half past six.

What happened at the next wedding

The first proper outing was Carol's daughter's wedding, which was the first evening do I had been to since the one in the corridor.

Three women asked me about it before the speeches. The woman beside me at the table started it, because she asked where it was from before she asked my name.

The third was Lorraine, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I wear. She looked at me and asked whether I had lost weight. I have not lost an ounce. I have decided to take it as a compliment anyway.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I sat down and I stayed sitting. I did not go out to the corridor. I did not stand at the edge of the room with my arms folded. I ate a full dinner and then I danced to two songs, which I had not realised I had been quietly avoiding at every one of these for years until I stopped.

And at the end of the night I got into the car and drove home in it, which I have never once done. There was nothing to get out of first. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. The dress should be doing the work. It is not just comfort. It is forty minutes of your evening and a corridor you never have to go and find, and it turns out that was most of what I dreaded about going out.

Two. The cowl was the part I did not expect. It drapes across instead of sitting tight on the throat, it is softer against the face than anything with a collar, and it means you need nothing at all at the neck.

Three. The length is not formal, it is forgiving. Floor length covers the shoes, which means you can wear the ones you can actually stand up in all night, and nobody is any the wiser.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Jilliann is $99.95. It was $199.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid that for the thing that goes underneath, never mind the dress.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no middleman taking a cut, and they have their end of season sale on at the moment, which is fifty per cent off, with free shipping Australia wide.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and had a proper look before I ordered. Six colours, black, beige, navy blue, burgundy, pink and light blue, and the sizes run from a small to a 4XL, all at the same price, which I notice, because for most of my life it has not been.

Then I ordered the burgundy as well for December, which Carol says was predictable. She is not wrong.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the kitchen with the teapot between us and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have spent years buying a dress and then buying a second thing to get through the evening in, not because you like it but because that seemed to be all there was, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a dress will change your life. It will not. But there is something in walking into a room at seven o’clock already comfortable, and knowing you will still be comfortable at eleven, that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the free shipping goes with it. And it is the black and the navy that go first, which I found out because Carol had to wait a week for hers.

I have not been back out to a corridor since.

Maggie