At 55, I Worked Out Why Patterned Shirts Made Me Look Wider. It Was The Direction.

A note from a reader about the shirts from a small Australian boutique that solved the problem with a seam rather than with a smaller size.

I have always liked an interesting shirt on other women and never once liked one on myself, and for about fifteen years I assumed that was a fact about my body rather than a fact about the shirts.

So I bought plain. Plain linen, plain cotton, three of them in slightly different neutrals, and then a scarf to make the plain ones look like I had thought about it. Which is a lot of effort to arrive back at plain.

Every so often I would try a patterned one. Stand in front of the mirror. Decide it made me look wider, square, somehow like more of me than there actually was. Put it back on the rail and go home with another beige.

What I never did was ask why. I had assumed it was the pattern. It was not the pattern.

What it is

The one I ordered is a short sleeved shirt, and it is made of two different fabrics. One half is a plain soft grey. The other is a fine grey and white check. And they are joined by a single seam that runs on a diagonal, from the shoulder down across the body.

That diagonal is the entire thing, and here is why.

A pattern that covers you all over gives the eye nothing to follow, so it reads you as one block, and a block is always wider than a shape. A horizontal join is worse, because it cuts you in half across the middle at exactly the place you did not want pointed at. But a line on a diagonal pulls the eye down and across. It is the same principle as a wrap dress, and it is doing the work that I had spent fifteen years asking plain beige to do.

The rest of it is sensible. A proper collar and a short button placket, which is what keeps a busy fabric reading as a shirt rather than as a top. Short sleeves cut a little loose through the arm. A boxy, easy body with room in it, and a straight hem that sits over trousers without needing to be tucked.

The fabric is light and slightly textured, the sort that creases a bit and does not look worse for it.

The grey one. Two fabrics, one diagonal seam, and that is the whole trick.

I had spent years blaming my shape for something that was a question of which way the line ran.

What happened at lunch

I wore it to a long lunch with women who have watched me wear beige since about 2010.

Two of them asked me where it was from before we had ordered. The third said I looked like I had lost weight, which I have not, and which I have now heard three times about this shirt and not once about anything plain I own.

What I noticed, though, was that I did not do the thing. The thing where you sit down and quietly rearrange the front of what you are wearing, and then do it again twenty minutes later.

“You are wearing a pattern,” my sister said, with the tone of someone witnessing a minor miracle.

→ See the shirt collection

What changed

I was not trying to become a person who wears bold prints. I wanted to own something with a bit of life in it that I would actually put on. Three things I noticed, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. Two calm halves beat one busy whole. Each fabric on its own is quiet. It is the join that makes it interesting. That is a completely different proposition to a shirt covered in one loud print, and it is why this one does not wear me.

2. The collar is what makes it work. A collar and a placket give the eye something structured to land on at the top. Without them the same fabric would read as a holiday top. With them it reads as a shirt you chose.

3. It needs nothing else. No scarf, no necklace, no jacket to break it up. The contrast is already inside the shirt, so getting dressed is one decision instead of three. I have not worn the scarf since.

There are sixteen in the collection and they work the same way — patchwork, colour blocks, stripes going in more than one direction, florals, geometrics, even a dog print if that is your sort of thing. All at the same price.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because sixty-nine ninety-nine made me suspicious rather than pleased. So I sat down and added up what fifteen years of solving this the wrong way has cost me.

• The all-over print shirt I wore once and quietly retired, $90
• Three plain linen shirts, bought because plain felt safe, $180
• The scarf I bought to make the plain ones look interesting, $45
• A shirt from this collection, $69.99

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …and it was the seam??

They are a small boutique selling directly, which is most of the answer, and the rest is that it is on sale. $69.99 instead of $214.00, which is around two thirds off, 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 cup of tea and you asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that if patterned shirts have never worked on you, it is worth checking which way the lines run before you decide it is you. All over, and you read as a block. Straight across, and you get cut in half. On a diagonal, and suddenly the same person looks longer. It is not a trick and it is not a camera angle. It is just geometry.

I would tell you to go for a bolder one than you think. The two-halves construction takes the heat out of a pattern, so the one that looks like too much on the screen is usually about right on.

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 the first one will replace about four things you currently own.

And I would tell you that delivery is free anywhere in Australia and there are thirty days to send it back, so it costs you nothing but the trouble of putting it on with the trousers you already have, which is the only fitting that has ever told me the truth anyway.

If you have a wardrobe of safe neutrals and a scarf doing the work of an entire outfit, this is worth ten minutes of your evening.

It was never your shape. It was the direction of the line.

— Maggie