A letter from a reader

At 58, I laid six perfectly nice things out on the bed and still had nothing to wear. My friend worked out why before I did.

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 puts on over the top has never been any of my business.

But four women have asked me about this in the last fortnight, 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 Bev, who had come round to help me decide what to wear to her daughter’s engagement. I had laid six things out on the bed. The good black trousers. The white shirt. The navy top. The grey knit. The dark jeans. A cardigan. All of them perfectly nice, all of them bought on purpose, none of them cheap. She stood at the end of the bed and looked at the lot for a good while, and then she said it.

You do not need another top, Maggie. You need one thing with something going on, to put over the ones you have already got.

I laughed, and then I looked down at the bed, and she was right. Six garments. Not one pattern between them. Not one colour you could name without using the word dark. I had spent about fifteen years assembling a wardrobe of components, every one of them sensible on its own, and the six of them together still did not add up to an outfit.

I did not set out to build a wardrobe with nothing in it. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one sensible purchase at a time, until a friend is standing at the end of your bed telling you that six good things are not an outfit.

How it happens

When I actually thought about how I had ended up with six of the same thing in different shapes, I understood what I had been doing.

Every single one of them was bought to go with something. That is how you shop once you are past fifty and sensible. You do not buy the thing you like, you buy the thing that will go, and the thing that will go is always the quieter of the two. You do that four times a year for fifteen years and you end up with a wardrobe in which absolutely everything goes with absolutely everything, and none of it does anything at all.

Goes with everything, or too much. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want one piece whose entire job is to be the interesting one.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy another navy top. You lay six of them on a bed. And you say you have nothing to wear while standing in front of a full wardrobe, which is a sentence I had always thought was a joke about women and had never once examined.

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 needed more clothes. Every time this happened I went and bought another top, and the new top was the same as the old top, because I bought it the same way.

It turns out it was never about how much I had.

It is about whether anything I owned was doing any talking. A wardrobe of plain things is not a wardrobe, it is a base, and a base needs one piece on top of it with a print, or a texture, or something at the sleeve. Put that over the plain things and the plain things stop being the outfit and start being the background, which is the job they were always best at. You do not need six more garments. You need one louder one.

It took me until 58, and six nice things on a bed, to work that out.

The collection is called the Jackets

They are from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. Bev found them, which given the circumstances she is entitled to bring up as often as she likes.

They are light printed jackets with ruffle detail, which is a combination I would have walked straight past a year ago. There are seventeen of them and every one has something going on — paisleys, florals, a gingham, a leopard, a cow print, a western one, and one with embroidery on it. Mine is a paisley. Bev has the leopard and wears it to the shops, which I think is magnificent.

The ruffle is the part that matters more than I expected. A printed jacket with a flat, plain cut is just a loud shirt, and I would have taken it off within the hour. The ruffle gives it some movement and some softness at the shoulder, which is what makes it read as a piece rather than as a pattern. It is light, so it goes over a t-shirt in October without being a coat. And it is a jacket, so it stays open and the plain thing underneath does its job of being quiet.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is one garment doing the talking so the other six do not have to.

What happened at the engagement

The first proper outing was the engagement itself, over the good black trousers and the white shirt, which is two of the six from the bed.

Three women asked me about it before the speeches. Bev’s sister started it, because she said she had been trying to work out where I had got the whole outfit and I had to tell her the whole outfit was eleven years old apart from the jacket.

The third was Lorraine, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I wear. She looked at me and asked whether I had had my colours done. I have not had my colours done. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was the six things. They have all come back out. The navy top, which I had stopped wearing because it was dull, is not dull with this over it. The grey knit is the same. I have not bought a single new thing since, and I have had more to wear in the last month than in the two years before it, which I had not realised was even possible until it happened.

The next morning I put it on over the grey t-shirt to go to the markets, which is the same jacket doing a completely different job. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. A wardrobe of plain things is a base, not a wardrobe. Six sensible garments that all go with each other go precisely nowhere. They needed one thing on top with something to say.

Two. The ruffle is what makes it a piece and not a loud shirt. I would not have believed that mattered. Flat and printed is a pattern. Printed with some movement at the shoulder is a jacket.

Three. One louder thing makes everything quieter you already own useful again. That is the maths nobody ever explained to me. I did not need a new wardrobe. I needed the one piece that made the old one work.

About the price

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

They are $84.95. They were $214.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a navy top that went with everything and did nothing.

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. Seventeen of them, every one a different print and every one the same price, so you are choosing on what you like rather than on what you can justify. That took me a while. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Then I ordered the floral one as well, which Bev says was the whole point of showing me in the first place.

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 stood in front of a full wardrobe and said out loud that you have nothing to wear, and every single thing in it was bought because it would go with something else, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a jacket will change your life. It will not. But there is something in putting on clothes you already own and having them look like you chose them 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 paisleys and the florals that go first, which I found out because Bev had to wait a week for the leopard.

I have not bought another navy top since.

Maggie