A letter from a reader

At 67, my son told me I looked tired on the video call. I had slept nine hours and been for a walk.

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 to sit in front of a screen has never been any of my business.

But four women have asked me about these in the last fortnight, two of them at the same table at book club, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with Michael, my son, who lives in Brisbane and rings on a Sunday so the children can say hello. We were about ten minutes in when he stopped, leaned towards his camera the way they do, and asked whether I was all right, because I looked tired. I said I was perfectly fine. He said I looked tired. I had slept nine hours and been down to the beach and back before nine. And then, after we hung up, I sat and looked at the little picture of myself still frozen on the screen, and I understood what he had actually been looking at.

He was not looking at my face. He was looking at a grey round-necked top, under a ceiling light, from the chest up.

I laughed, and then I went and got my phone and looked back through every photograph anybody had taken of me in the last two years, and it was the same thing in most of them. Navy round neck. Grey round neck. Black round neck. Nothing at all between the top of a plain neckline and my chin, and all of it photographed under whatever light happened to be in the room.

I did not decide to spend my sixties in plain round necks. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one sensible purchase at a time, until your son is leaning towards a camera in another state asking whether you have been sleeping.

How it happens

When I actually went looking for something to wear from the chest up, I understood how I had ended up with a drawer of plain necklines.

The shops give you two choices. There is the plain top, round neck, one colour, which is sensible and washes well and is what you buy when you are buying four things at once. And there is the good blouse, which is for occasions, which lives on a hanger, and which nobody is putting on to talk to a grandchild on a Sunday.

Plain or saved for best. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want the sort of thing she could actually sit about in on a Sunday that did not disappear into her own neck.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the plain one. You put it on. You decide, over a few years, that the tiredness in the photographs is something about you, and you assume that is simply what the sixties look like.

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 was not photogenic any more. I had decided it quite firmly. I had started turning slightly away when anybody held up a phone.

It turns out it was never about my face.

It is about what is underneath it. A collar sits up and holds a shape instead of lying flat on your collarbone, so there is a line and a bit of structure where there was nothing before. And a print near the face puts some colour back under it, which a flat grey does the exact opposite of. The two of them together mean the camera has something to look at besides whatever the ceiling light is doing.

It took me until 67, and a frozen picture of myself on a laptop, to work that out.

The collection is called the Collared Tops

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

They are collared tops rather than blouses, which is the distinction that mattered to me. A proper collar at the neck, an easy shape through the body, and a print on every single one. There are twenty-four of them and not one is plain, which when you have spent a decade in grey is quite a thing to be confronted with. Mine is a striped one. Kate has her eye on the one with the dogs on it.

The collar is the part that matters. It stands rather than lies, so there is a line under the chin where a round neck gives you nothing at all, and it does that whether you are standing up or sitting at a kitchen table in front of a laptop. The print does the other half. A bit of colour and pattern near the face lifts everything above it, which is exactly the job I had spent years asking a scarf to do and then taking the scarf off because it was too warm.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is a collar and a print, doing something a plain grey neckline cannot.

What happened on the next Sunday

The first proper outing, if you can call it that, was the same video call the following Sunday, from the same chair, under the same ceiling light.

Three people asked me about it, and two of them are under eight. My granddaughter started it, because she wanted to know whether I had one with dogs on. The answer, as of Tuesday, is yes.

The third was Michael, who did not ask me whether I was all right. He asked whether I had been somewhere nice. I had not been anywhere at all. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was that I stopped turning away. At the markets on the Saturday somebody took a photograph of the four of us and I did not do the thing where you angle yourself slightly, which I had not realised I had been doing in every single photograph for about three years until I stopped.

The next morning I put it straight back on to go to the shops, because it is a top and not an occasion. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. It was never my face. Three years of deciding I did not photograph well any more, and the thing that was wrong was a flat grey neckline under a ceiling light.

Two. A collar does what a scarf was trying to do. And it does it without being warm, without needing arranging, and without coming off at eleven in the morning and living on the back of a chair.

Three. Twenty-four prints and not one plain one is the point. I would have bought the plain one. I have bought the plain one about forty times. Not having the option turned out to be the kindest thing anybody has done for my wardrobe.

About the price

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

They are $69.95. They were $214.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid nearly that for a plain grey top that has done nothing for me except not be wrong.

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 spring and anniversary sale on at the moment, with free shipping Australia wide, and a little more off again if you take two or more.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and had a proper look before I ordered. Twenty-four of them, every one a different print and every one the same price, which took the deciding out of it in one direction and put it straight back in the other. I was at that screen for some time.

Then I ordered the one with the dogs on it for myself as well, which Kate says was never in any doubt.

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 quietly decided that you do not photograph well any more, or that you look tired in every picture somebody takes of you, and you have put that down to your age without once looking at what was underneath your chin, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a top will change your life. It will not. But there is something in not turning slightly away when somebody holds up a phone 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 stripes and the florals that go first, which I found out because Kate had to wait a week for hers.

Nobody has asked me whether I am all right since.

Maggie