A letter from a reader

At 47, my daughter laid out everything I owned for a wedding, looked at the bed and said: Mum, it is all navy.

I want to say at the start that I am not a person who writes things. I am a person who reads things and then gets on with the day. But this has now been explained out loud five times in three weeks, twice to the same woman, and writing it down once seemed more sensible than explaining it a sixth.

It began on a Sunday afternoon with my daughter Kate on the end of my bed, which is where she sits when she has decided to be helpful.

There was a wedding coming. I had pulled out everything that might do and put it on the bed, which is a thing I have done before every event for about twenty years. Four dresses and two skirts. Kate looked at the bed for a while, and then she said it, and she did not say it unkindly.

Mum, it is all navy. Every single thing on this bed is navy or black. Was it always?

I said of course not, and then I went and had a proper look, because I was not actually sure. It was not always. There is a photograph of me in 2011 at my brother’s fiftieth in a green dress and I remember the green dress. I remember liking it. And somewhere between then and that Sunday afternoon every single thing I bought for an occasion came home navy, and I could not tell you one single moment where I decided that.

Nobody sits down at forty and decides to stop wearing colour. That is the thing I keep coming back to. There is no year it happens in. There is just a long row of small sensible decisions and then one afternoon your daughter is looking at a bed with six navy things on it.

How it happens

Once I started paying attention to it I could see exactly how I had got there, and it is depressingly simple.

You are in a shop. There are two of the same dress. One is navy and one is yellow. And you pick up the navy one, and if anybody asked you why you would say it is more versatile, or it goes with more, or you will get more wear out of it. Perfectly reasonable. Sensible woman, sensible choice.

But that is not the reason, and I know it is not the reason because I have now caught myself doing it. The real reason is that the yellow one would be noticed, and somewhere along the line I had quietly accepted that a woman of my age being noticed is a slightly embarrassing thing to arrange on purpose.

Nobody ever said that to me. I would like to be clear about that. Don has never once suggested it and my mother certainly never did. I appear to have worked it out entirely on my own and then spent fifteen years acting on it.

What I had wrong

Here is where I had the whole thing upside down.

I believed colour was loud. That was the assumption underneath everything. Navy was quiet and colour was loud, and at my age quiet was the correct setting.

It is not about the colour. It is about the shape.

Think about what I had actually been buying instead. Navy, yes, but navy with a print on it, or a bit of lace at the neck, or beading on the shoulder, or a peplum, or a ruffle down one side. Because a plain navy dress feels like nothing, so you buy a navy dress with something going on to make up for it. And a busy shape is what people notice. All that fuss was doing far more shouting than a colour ever did.

A plain shape in a strong colour is the quiet one. There is one thing happening, and because it is only one thing it reads as though you chose it. All that fuss in navy reads as though you were trying to get away with something.

It took me until 47 to work that out, and I worked it out from a photograph of myself in 2011.

The dress is called the Roxanne

It is from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique my sister Carol found first and has mentioned at every opportunity since.

It is a sleeveless maxi and the shape of it is almost nothing, which is precisely the point. A softly gathered neckline, no beading and no lace. A ruched waist, which gathers you in through the middle. And then it falls away into a long skirt in a light chiffon-inspired fabric that moves when you do. No print. No ruffle. Nothing on the shoulder.

It comes in four colours, and here is the part that made me sit up: navy blue, sage green, yellow and fuchsia pink. I looked at that list for longer than I would like to admit.

I did not order the navy. I want that on the record, because I nearly did, and I had the navy one in the basket for about ten minutes before I took it out again.

The ruching is doing real work, by the way, and it is worth understanding. Gathered fabric across the middle gives you a waist without anything stiff in it — no boning, no panel, nothing to dig in after an hour sitting down at a table. It is just fabric pulled in, and it holds a shape because it is gathered. Which means you get a defined middle and you can still eat the dinner.

And on the sleeveless question, which I will come back to because it was my first objection: the website suggests a wrap with it, and a wrap is what I wore. That solved it entirely and I stopped thinking about my arms within about ten minutes of arriving.

What happened at the wedding

I wore the sage green. Not the yellow, which I am building up to, and not the fuchsia, which Kate has already told me I will end up in.

Four people said something, which for a woman who has arrived at every event since 2011 in navy is a statistical event in itself. But it was not the number that got me. It was what they said.

Not one of them said the dress was nice. Every single one of them said some version of you look well. Which I have thought about a great deal since, because a navy dress with beading on the shoulder has never once got me a you look well.

The one I keep thinking about was Lorraine. I have known Lorraine twenty years and she has never commented on anything I have worn in all that time, not once, not even the green dress in 2011. She came over at about eight, looked at me, and asked whether I had done something different. I said I had worn a colour. She said well there you are then, and went to get a drink.

There was one other thing, and it is the one I would actually want you to know. Halfway through the night I realised I had not checked myself once. No going to the ladies to have a look, no turning slightly away from the camera, none of the small adjusting I do all evening without noticing. There was nothing to adjust. It was one piece of fabric with a gather at the middle.

Three things I have learned since

One. Versatile was never the reason. I said versatile in shops for fifteen years and I meant unnoticeable. It is worth catching yourself saying it, because the moment you hear it properly you cannot say it again with a straight face.

Two. One thing happening is the whole trick. A strong colour in a plain shape is quieter than a quiet colour in a busy shape, and I had it precisely backwards. If the dress is doing one thing, you look as though you chose it. If it is doing four things, you look as though you were hoping.

Three. Ruching is not shapewear. It gathers you in with nothing stiff involved, which means it holds a waist for six hours at a table instead of forty minutes. I had spent years assuming a defined middle had to come with something digging into me.

About the price

I will be straight about this part because it is the first thing I looked at and I expect it is the first thing you looked at too.

It is $79.95. The site has it marked down from $399.00, and I am not going to pretend to you that I know where the three hundred and ninety-nine came from, because I do not. I did not pay it and neither will you. What I can tell you is the number that left my account, which was seventy-nine dollars and ninety-five cents, and that there is an Afterpay option at four payments of $19.99 if that suits you better.

The comparison that actually mattered to me was a different one. I have a navy dress in that wardrobe that cost me two hundred and ten dollars in 2019. It has beading on one shoulder. Nobody has ever said anything about it.

There is no catch that I could find. They are a small boutique selling direct, so nobody is taking a cut in the middle, and there is an end of season sale on at the moment with free shipping Australia-wide.

I had a proper look before I ordered, the way I imagine you are doing now. Four colours. Sizes from an AU 10 up to an AU 18. It is fitted through the middle because of the ruching, so I would read the sizing rather than guess, which I say as a woman who guessed and got lucky.

There is a thirty day money-back guarantee, which is genuinely the only reason I was willing to order a colour I had not worn since 2011.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you were sat at this table with a cup of tea in front of you, this is what I would say.

Go and look at what you own for occasions. All of it, out on the bed, the way Kate made me. And if it is all one colour, do not tell yourself that is your taste until you have checked whether it is actually your taste.

Mine was not. Mine was fifteen years of picking up the navy one and saying the word versatile.

I am not going to tell you a dress changes anything, because it does not. But four people told me I looked well, and the only thing I had changed was that the dress was green, and I would rather you knew that than spent another decade finding out the way I did.

Two practical notes. The sale is on now and the free shipping comes with it. And read the sizing, because the ruched waist is fitted and that is not a thing to guess at.

Nobody said the dress was nice. All four of them said I looked well.

Maggie