A letter from a reader

At 45, my daughter watched me tug at a hem in a changing room and asked how long I had been doing that.

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 length another woman wears has never been any of my business.

But three different women have asked me about this dress since the long weekend, two of them in the queue at the chemist, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with Kate, my daughter, sitting on the little stool outside a changing room while I tried things on. I came out in a dress, looked in the long mirror, and did the thing. Hands at the hem, pulling down, standing up straighter, pulling down again. She watched the whole performance over the top of her phone and then she said it.

Mum, how long have you been doing that? Because you did it with the last one too. And the one before.

I laughed, and then I looked at myself in that mirror with my hands still on the hem, and she was right. Three dresses, three tugs. And it was not that they were too short exactly. They all finished just above the knee, which is where dresses finish, and just above the knee is a place I have been uneasy about since roughly my fortieth birthday.

I did not decide to spend fifteen years with my hands at my hem. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one changing room at a time, until your own daughter is counting the tugs.

How it happens

When I actually went looking for a length I could stop thinking about, I understood what the shops had been doing.

There are two lengths on the racks and there always have been. Just above the knee, which is the default and which has been the default since I was at school. And floor length, which is for a wedding and which I will trip up a kerb in.

Too short or an event. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want the length that is in between, which is the one that suits almost everybody.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the knee-length one because that is what there is. You spend the day with your hands at the hem whenever you stand up, and you assume that is simply what wearing a dress 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 my legs. Every time a dress made me uneasy I decided something about me was the matter, and I bought the next one in black.

It turns out it was never about my legs at all.

It is about where the hem lands. Mid-calf is far enough down that there is nothing to tug and nothing to think about when you sit, cross your legs or get out of a car, and it is far enough up that it moves with you and does not catch under a sandal. The whole leg reads as one line instead of ending at the one point you were worrying about.

It took me until 45, and my daughter on a stool, to work that out.

The dress is called the Gabrielle

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

The dress is called the Gabrielle. A flowing midi that finishes at the middle of the calf, in a soft light fabric, with a round neck and small cap sleeves and a gathered seam under the bust so the skirt swings rather than hangs. Mine is the white, which I would never have risked at the knee. There are eleven colours.

The length is the part that matters. Mid-calf is low enough that sitting down, getting out of the car and bending to pick something up are all simply things you do rather than things you manage. It is high enough that it never catches under a shoe and never drags on a wet footpath. And because the skirt is gathered from under the bust it moves as you walk instead of hanging straight, which is the difference between a midi that looks chosen and one that looks like a compromise.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is the length that was always missing from the rack.

What happened at the wedding

The first proper outing was a wedding at a winery, on grass, in the heat, with a lot of standing up and sitting down.

Three women asked me about it before the speeches. The woman I was seated next to started it, because she said she had been looking for exactly that length for about a decade.

The third was Lorraine, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I wear. She asked whether it was an expensive one. I have decided to take that as a compliment and I did not answer her.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was my hands. They were on my glass, or on the back of a chair, or doing nothing at all. They were not on my hem once, all day, through two hours of standing and a very long sit-down lunch, which I had not realised I had been doing at every single event for fifteen years until I stopped.

The next morning I put it straight back on to go and get coffee, which is not a thing you do with a wedding dress. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. It was never my legs. It was seven centimetres. Fifteen years of deciding something about me was the matter, and the thing that was the matter was where the hem stopped.

Two. Mid-calf is the length nobody sells you. Just above the knee or on the floor. The one in between suits almost everybody and you practically have to go looking for it.

Three. It swings, which is why it does not look dowdy. That was my fear about a longer dress, and it is the gathering under the bust that answers it. The skirt moves. A straight one would not.

About the price

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

The Gabrielle is $57.95. It was $114.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid twice that for a dress I spent an entire afternoon pulling at.

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, with free shipping Australia wide.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and had a proper look before I ordered. Eleven colours, which is more than I have ever been offered in my life, and the sizes run from an AU 8 right up to an AU 24, all at the same price, which I notice, because for most of my life it has not been.

Then I ordered the mint green as well, which Kate says is the first interesting thing I have bought this decade.

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 a photograph from every event of the last ten years in which your hands are somewhere near your hem, and you have always assumed that was something about you, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at where the hem was finishing.

Not because a dress will change your life. It will not. But there is something in getting through a whole day without once reaching for your hem 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 white and the black that go first, which I found out because Kate had to wait a week for hers.

I have not pulled at a hem since.

Maggie