At 67, I Wore Beige For Ten Years. Then I Bought One Printed Blouse.

A note from a reader about the printed blouses from a small Australian boutique that ended a decade of safe neutrals, and take about four seconds to put on in the morning.

Somewhere in my fifties I quietly decided that print was for other women, and I filled a wardrobe with navy, grey, black and a beige that did me no favours at all.

It was not a decision I remember making. It was one safe top at a time, over about ten years, until every single thing on the rail was a variation of the same thing. Sensible. Matching. Completely forgettable.

And the odd part is that I was not any better dressed for it. I was just harder to notice. I would stand there at half past seven in the morning in front of a full wardrobe, pick the navy one again, and feel precisely nothing about it.

Three weeks ago my daughter talked me into one printed blouse from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique I had not heard of. I have since bought three more, and I have not touched the navy one once.

What it is

It is a loose, lightweight blouse with a soft notch V neckline and a single button at the front, so there is no fiddly placket and nothing gaping where you do not want it to. The sleeves are three quarter length with a little tab and button at the cuff, so you can roll them to the elbow and they actually stay there. The body is cut generously and finishes in a curved shirttail hem that sits over trousers and jeans without needing to be tucked.

But the part that actually changed things for me is the print.

They are watercolour florals, mostly. Roses and leaves and soft washes of pink and blue and green on a light ground, the sort of thing you would see on a good scarf rather than on a supermarket top. There are twenty-seven of them at the moment, and they are genuinely different from one another, not the same pattern in four colourways.

The first one. I ordered it to prove my daughter wrong and it did not go to plan.

The print is doing the work that I used to think an outfit needed accessories, effort and a decent night’s sleep to do.

What happened at the morning tea

The fourth time I wore it was a morning tea at my neighbour Jan’s, the sort where everybody knows what everybody else wears, because we have all been wearing it for years.

Two women asked me where it was from before the kettle had finished. One of them was Jan herself, who has known me since the children were small and has never once remarked on a single thing I have worn.

She asked if I had been somewhere nice. I had not. I had been to the bins and back. It is the blouse.

“You look like you have been somewhere,” Jan said. “Where did that come from?”

→ See the twenty-seven prints

What changed in three weeks

I was not trying to look younger. By a certain age you lower that bar to tidy, and then again to clean and comfortable. What surprised me about these is that they gave me all three and something else besides, without me doing anything differently.

Three things I noticed in the first fortnight, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. The print does the work. A plain top needs a necklace, a scarf, a jacket and good lighting to look considered. A good print needs none of them. I put it on with the trousers I already own and I am finished. That is the whole of it.

2. The sleeves roll and stay. The tab and button at the cuff hold them at the elbow instead of creeping back down your forearm by ten in the morning. Covered when I want covered, out of the way when I am at the sink.

3. The hem decides the outfit. It is cut longer and curved, so it skims straight past the middle and sits over the top of everything. No tucking, no pulling at it, and no standing sideways in the mirror first.

The little tab at the cuff. A small thing, and the reason the sleeves stay put.

It is light enough for a Perth spring, which is the real test, and loose enough that I can kneel in the garden and reach up to the top shelf without anything pulling across the back.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me. Seventy-two dollars and ninety-nine cents for a blouse like this is, frankly, suspicious. So I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down what I had actually paid for the plain tops I stopped wearing.

• The navy blouse I reached for every morning, $129
• The grey one I wore twice and quietly gave away, $148
• A Perth Boutique printed blouse, $72.99

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

They are a small boutique selling directly, which is most of the answer, and the rest of it is that this is their spring and anniversary sale. The blouses are marked from $182.00 down to $72.99, which is a little over sixty per cent off, and the sale is not running forever.

What I’d tell you if we were friends

If you were sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea and you asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that women our age have spent years being quietly taught that print is loud and neutral is safe, and that it is the wrong way round. Neutral is not safe. Neutral is invisible. A good print is the easiest thing you will ever do for an outfit, and it asks nothing of you at seven in the morning.

I would tell you to order more than one. 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 one will not be enough once you have worn it. I started with one to prove a point. I am now at four.

I would tell you to pick the print you keep going back to on the screen rather than the one you think is sensible. The sensible one is how I ended up with ten years of beige.

And I would tell you that delivery is free anywhere in Australia and there are thirty days to send it back, so the whole thing costs you nothing but the trouble of trying it on in your own bedroom, which is the only mirror that has ever told me the truth anyway.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been reaching past everything interesting in your wardrobe for the same safe navy top, please do not wait on this one.

While the prints you actually like are still in stock.

— Maggie