A letter from a reader

At 56, I found a dress in my wardrobe with the tags still on it. I had been saving it since 2021.

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 is saving for best has never been any of my business.

But four women have asked me about this dress in the last month, two of them at the same lunch, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with my son Michael, who was home and looking for a coat hanger, and who came out of my wardrobe holding a dress at arm’s length with the tag still swinging off the sleeve. He asked whether it was new. I said it was not. He asked how not new. I had to look at the tag myself to answer him. Then he said it.

Mum, you have been saving this for five years. What exactly were you saving it for?

I laughed, and then I could not answer him, and he was right to ask. Five years. It had come to the house for a wedding that got cancelled, and after that it had become a good dress, and good dresses are for something, and nothing had ever been quite enough of a something. It is not that I forgot it. I walked past it most days.

I did not set out to own clothes I was not allowed to wear. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one good dress at a time, until your grown son is holding a five-year-old tag up to the light.

How it happens

When I actually thought about why I was saving things, I understood what made a dress a saved dress.

It is the price. Not the colour, not the cut. The moment something costs enough to think about, it stops being clothing and becomes an investment, and you do not spend an investment on a Thursday. You wait for an occasion that justifies it, and occasions are rarer than clothes are.

Expensive and saved, or cheap and disappointing. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want a dress good enough to be pleased by and ordinary enough to put on without a reason.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the good one. You hang it up. You walk past it for five years, and you assume that is simply what having nice things means.

What I had wrong

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

I thought my problem was that I did not go anywhere worth it. I used to say it out loud. There is nowhere to wear it round here.

It turns out it was never about where I was going.

It is about what the dress cost. Below a certain number a thing is simply clothes, and clothes get worn, and a dress that gets worn a hundred times is worth more than a better one hanging in the dark. The price is not a detail about the dress. For a woman like me it is the whole difference between owning something and using it.

It took me until 56, and a tag from 2021, to work that out.

The dress is called the Oriella

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

The dress is called the Oriella. A soft, lightweight A-line with delicate ruffle detail, in one colour only. It is nice enough that I was pleased when I opened it, and it cost little enough that I put it on the same afternoon to walk down to the post box.

The price is the part that matters, which is not a thing I expected to write about a dress. At eighty-nine dollars it never became an investment, so it never became a saved thing, so it has been worn eleven times since it arrived and the tag was off within the hour. The A-line and the ruffle are why I was pleased with it. The number on the tag is why it is in the wash rather than in the dark.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is good enough to like and cheap enough to use.

What happened at the lunch

The first proper outing, if you can call it that, was a lunch at Bev’s with four of us and a quiche.

Three women asked me about it before the dessert. Bev’s neighbour started it, because she assumed it was something I had been keeping for an occasion and I told her it had already been to the post box twice.

The third was Lorraine, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I wear. She asked what I had it on for. Nothing, I said. She thought about that for a moment. I have decided to take it as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was that I stopped protecting it. I did not sit carefully. I did not think about the quiche. I did not hang it up the second I got in and look at it for marks, which I had not realised I had been doing with anything decent for about twenty years until I stopped.

The next morning it went in the wash with the towels, and it came out fine, and that was the moment it properly became mine. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. A dress you are saving is not a dress you own. Five years in the dark with a tag on it. On any honest accounting I had paid for it and never once had it.

Two. The price decides whether you wear it. Not the colour, not the cut, not how much you like it. Below a certain number a thing is clothing. Above it, it becomes an investment and investments do not go to the post box.

Three. Worn a hundred times beats better and hanging up. The 2021 dress is a nicer dress than this one. I have worn this one eleven times in a month and that one not at all.

About the price

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

The Oriella is $89.99. It was $299.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch at seventy per cent off, and then I realised that the catch, for me, had always been the opposite one.

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 on this one is seventy 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. It comes in the one colour, which saved me a decision I would otherwise have spent a week on, and the sizes run from an XS to a 2XL at the same price.

Then I took the 2021 dress to the op shop with the tag still on it, which Michael says was the correct decision and which I am still a little sore about.

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 there is something hanging in your wardrobe with the tag on it, and you could tell me roughly what year it arrived, 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 putting something on for no reason on a Thursday 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 middle sizes that go first, which I found out because Bev had to wait a week for hers.

I have not saved anything for best since.

Maggie