A letter from a reader

At 61, I put a floral dress back on the rack, and my sister asked me what exactly I thought was going to happen if I bought it.

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 has never been any of my business.

But four women have asked me about this dress 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 Carol, my sister, in a shop in Claremont where I had gone to keep her company. I had a dress in my hand. I had held it up against myself at the mirror at the end of the rack, and I had liked it, properly liked it, and then I had put it back. She watched me do it and asked why. I said what I always say, which is that florals are not for me. She asked since when. I could not tell her. And then she said it.

What do you think is going to happen, Maggie? Who exactly is going to come up to you and say you are too old for flowers?

I laughed, and then I stood there holding nothing at all, and I could not answer her. Nobody. There is nobody. I have never once in my life heard a woman told she was too old for a pattern. I had decided it on my own, somewhere in my forties, and then obeyed it for twenty years without ever checking whether it was true.

I did not decide to spend twenty years in plain colours. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one dress put back on a rack at a time, until your sister asks you a perfectly simple question in a shop and you cannot answer it.

How it happens

When I actually went looking, and properly looked, I understood where the rule had come from.

The shops give you two choices. There are the busy ones, where the flowers are small and dense and there is no gap anywhere between them, so from more than a few feet away the whole thing dissolves into a texture. And there are the plain ones, navy and grey and that particular shade of taupe, which are safe and which I have about eleven of.

Curtains or plain. That was the whole shopping centre. And I had looked at the first lot, quite reasonably, and decided they were not for me, and then made the enormous mistake of extending that to every flower ever printed on anything.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the navy one. You wear it. You tell your sister that florals are not for you, in the tone of a woman stating a fact about herself, and you assume that is simply what suits you.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect I am not alone.

I thought my problem was florals. I said it for twenty years. I said it so often that it became one of the small facts people knew about me, like not eating fish.

It turns out it was never florals at all.

It is the size of the flower and how much space there is around it. A small, dense, all-over print with nothing between the flowers is the one that reads as upholstery, and it does that on a woman of any age at all. Make the flower bigger and leave some plain ground showing between them, and the same colours on the same fabric read as a dress. That is the entire difference, and nobody had ever said it to me.

It took me until 61, and my sister in a shop in Claremont, to work that out.

The collection is called the Spring Dresses

They are from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. Carol found them, which she reminds me of constantly and has frankly earned.

There are thirty-five dresses in it, and they are mostly florals, with some stripes, some geometrics, a few abstracts and one in a linen. Mine is a floral. I would like you to appreciate what it cost me to write that sentence.

The print is the part that matters. The flowers are large enough to still be flowers from across a room rather than blurring into a texture, and there is plain ground showing between them, which is the thing that stops the eye and keeps it from reading as fabric by the metre. The colours are not shy, but they are not shouting either. And because the shape of the dress underneath is simple, the print is the only thing going on, which is exactly how much pattern I can cope with.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is a flower with some room around it.

What happened at the eightieth

The first proper outing was an eightieth birthday lunch for a friend of Carol’s, at a place in Mosman Park, with about thirty people.

Three women asked me about it before the speeches. The one across the table started it, because she said she had been trying to work out where it was from since I sat down.

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 always worn florals. Twenty years, Lorraine. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was that I was not the plain one. There is always a plain one at a table of thirty, in the navy, slightly to the side in the photographs, and for about twenty years that has been me. I had not realised I had quietly taken that job on until somebody else was doing it.

The next morning I put it straight back on to go to the markets, because it is a dress and not a performance. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. It was never florals. It was the scale of them. Small and dense is upholstery on anybody. Larger, with space around it, is a dress. One sentence, and nobody said it to me for twenty years.

Two. Twenty years is a long time to obey a rule nobody ever made. I could not name a single person who told me flowers were not for me. I made it up, and then I kept it, which is the part I find hardest to look at.

Three. Thirty-five of them means you are allowed to be fussy. I did not take the first floral I saw. I went through the lot, twice, and chose on the print, which is a thing I have not been able to do in a shop for years.

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 dress whose entire job was to not be noticed.

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. Thirty-five of them and every one the same price, which is the detail I noticed, because it means you are choosing on the print and nothing else. There is no cheap end and no good end. I was at that screen for a considerable time.

Then I ordered a striped one as well, which Carol says is a gateway and which I am not going to dignify.

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 there is a thing you say about yourself in shops — that prints are not for you, or colour is not for you, or that is not really me — and you could not tell me who told you or when it started, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a dress will change your life. It will not. But there is something in not being the plain one at the side of the photograph 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 florals that go first, which I found out because Carol had to wait a week for hers.

I have not put anything back on a rack and said it is not for me since.

Maggie