At 46, I Wore A Black Maxi On A 36 Degree Day. I Was The Coolest Person There.

A note from a reader about the dresses from a small Australian boutique that go nowhere near you, and are therefore wearable in weather that ends everything else.

I had a rule about black in summer, the same rule everybody has, and I followed it for about twenty years without ever once checking whether it was true.

So from about October my wardrobe shrank to pale things. Cream, which I cannot eat in. White, which does not survive a glass of red or a kerbside coffee. A pale blue linen that creased so comprehensively by ten in the morning that I looked like I had slept in the car.

Meanwhile the black dresses hung there until April, which is a long time to own something and not use it.

The rule, it turns out, is half right. Black does hold heat. But it only does it where the fabric is actually touching you, and that is a question of the cut, not the colour.

What it is

The one I ordered is a black maxi, and the whole thing is built out of tiers.

The bodice is simple and close at the shoulders with a plain round neck. Below that the skirt is a series of ruffled tiers, each one gathered onto the one above, falling all the way to the floor. It is light chiffon, and because each tier is gathered it stands away from the one beneath it.

That is the part that matters. A tiered skirt barely makes contact. There is air between the fabric and you almost the whole way down, and air is the entire mechanism. A fitted black dress is hot because it is pressed against your skin. This one is not pressed against anything.

The sleeves are three quarter length and flared wide at the elbow, which sounds like extra fabric and behaves like the opposite. The sleeve is open at the bottom, so air moves up the arm rather than being trapped against it. Your arms are covered and they are not warm. I did not expect those two things to go together either.

And it moves. Walking across a car park, standing in front of a fan, any breeze at all, and the whole skirt lifts and shifts, which is pleasant and also the reason it stays cool.

The black one. Every tier is holding the fabric off you, which is the whole trick.

I had spent twenty summers avoiding a colour when the problem was how close the dress was sitting to me.

What happened on the hot day

I tested it properly on a day that got to thirty-six. An outdoor lunch, no shade worth speaking of, from midday until about four.

I will be honest, I put it on as an experiment and expected to regret it by one o’clock. I did not change. I did not go and stand inside. I had the sort of afternoon where you forget to think about the heat, which in that weather is the only review that counts.

A friend in a pale linen shift, who had been very polite about my choice earlier, asked me around three where it was from.

“You are in black,” she said, “and you look like you are the only one of us coping.”

→ See the dress collection

What changed

I was not looking for a summer uniform. I wanted my wardrobe back for six months of the year. Three things I noticed, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. Contact is the thing, not colour. Black absorbs more heat, but it can only pass that heat to you where it is touching you. Hold the fabric off the skin and the difference between a black dress and a pale one stops being something you can feel. That is why a loose black maxi and a fitted black dress are not the same garment at all.

2. A flared sleeve is a vent. Narrow sleeves trap air against your arm. A sleeve that opens out at the elbow lets it move. Covered arms stopped costing me anything, which had never been true of any cardigan I have owned.

3. Black is the practical colour in summer, not the impractical one. Sunscreen on the collar. Coffee. Grass. A dropped olive. I have stopped eating carefully, which I had not noticed I was doing until I stopped.

There are twenty-three in the collection and most of them work on the same principle — chiffon, pleats, tiers, wraps, things cut to float rather than to fit. Maxis, midis, florals, plain blacks, three-quarter sleeves and off-the-shoulder.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because eighty-six ninety-nine is not what I expected. So I sat down and added up what my pale-only rule has cost me.

• The cream dress I am genuinely afraid to eat in, worn four times, $150
• The pale blue linen that creases by ten in the morning, $110
• The white one, retired by a glass of red, $130
• A dress from this collection, $86.99

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …twenty summers??

They are a small boutique selling directly, which is most of the answer, and the rest is that it is on sale. Most of the collection is $86.99 instead of $172.00, and the discount stacks if you take more than one.

What I’d tell you if we were friends

If you were in my kitchen with a cold drink and you asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you to stop shopping for summer by colour and start shopping by contact. Pick the dress up off the rail and look at whether it would sit against you or hang away from you. That one question will tell you more about how a December afternoon is going to go than the shade ever will.

I would tell you that tiers and pleats and gathers are not decoration in this weather. They are structure. They are what holds the fabric away from your skin, and they are the reason a dress with more fabric in it can genuinely be cooler than one with less.

I would tell you to order two. Not because I want you spending money, but because the discount stacks — two is ten per cent off, three is fifteen, four is twenty — and because once you have one that works in real heat you will want the second before Christmas.

And I would tell you that delivery is free anywhere in Australia and there are thirty days to send it back, so you can put it on at home on the next warm afternoon and find out properly, which is the only test that has ever told me the truth anyway.

If half your wardrobe goes into storage every October, it is worth checking what you actually banned. I banned a colour.

What I should have banned was anything that touches me in February.

— Maggie