At 52, I Stopped Wearing Navy To Weddings. The Photographs Changed.

A note from a reader about the dresses from a small Australian boutique that ended a decade of being the woman you cannot pick out of the group photo.

My niece sent me the photographs from her wedding last year and I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time trying to find myself in them.

I was there. Third row, left hand side. Navy, three-quarter sleeves, just below the knee. So were four other women, give or take a shade. We looked like we had been issued with something.

And I understood exactly how it had happened, because I had done it to myself on purpose. You get an invitation and a set of rules arrives with it. Not white, obviously. Not black, apparently. Nothing too bright, in case you are seen to be trying. Nothing too short. Nothing that will upstage anybody. So you work your way down the list until the only thing left is navy, and you buy the navy, and you stand in the third row looking like a woman who followed instructions.

Three weeks before the next wedding, a friend sent me a link to Perth Boutique and said, in the kindest possible way, that I was allowed to wear a colour.

What it is

The one I ordered is a striped maxi, and I want to describe it properly because a photograph does not tell you why it works.

The bodice is strapless and striped horizontally, shirred so it holds its grip without anything over the shoulder. That was the first thing I checked, because strapless at a wedding usually means a day of quietly hitching something up in photographs. This does not move.

There is a proper seam at the natural waist. Not elastic, not a drawstring, an actual waistline. It takes your shape in at the one place you want it taken in and then it stops.

And below that the skirt opens out into full vertical panels, each one a different colour, falling all the way to the floor. Mustard, teal, burgundy, cream, olive, plum. It is a lot of colour and somehow not a loud dress, because the colours are deep rather than bright.

The practical part is the skirt. There is so much of it that sitting down, standing up, crossing a lawn in heels and eating a full three courses all stopped being things I had to think about.

The striped one. Deep colours rather than bright ones, which is the whole reason it works.

A wedding is the one day where everybody else has also decided to play it safe. Which means the safe choice is the one that disappears.

What happened at the wedding

It was a long one. A garden ceremony that started late, drinks standing on grass, a sit-down dinner, and dancing I had not planned on doing.

Three women asked me about the dress before the speeches. One of them was the bride’s mother, which I took as the highest possible authority on the matter.

And I did not spend the day managing it. I did not hitch the bodice up once. I sat down at a round table for two hours and got up again without doing the thing where you check behind you.

“You can actually see you in these,” my sister said when the photographs came through. She did not mean it as a compliment about the dress. That is why it landed.

→ See the wedding guest collection

What changed

I was not trying to be the most dressed woman in the room. I wanted to look like myself on a day that gets photographed more than any other. Three things I noticed, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. Deep colour is not the same as loud colour. This is the bit I had wrong for years. I thought the choice was navy or attention-seeking. A mustard, a burgundy, a forest green are all as grown-up as navy. They simply photograph as a person rather than as a background.

2. A waist seam does more than a size down. One defined line at the waist and the rest can be as full and easy as it likes. That is why I could eat properly and still have a shape in the photographs, which I had assumed were mutually exclusive.

3. Full skirts are the practical option. Not the fussy one. Grass, folding chairs, a long dinner and a dance floor are all easier in a skirt with room in it than in something straight that you have to sit down carefully in.

There are around thirty dresses in the collection and they are not all as bold as mine. Wraps, halters, pleated midis, florals, long sleeves if you would rather your arms covered. The common thread is that they are cut for a long day rather than for a photograph.

Now, about the price

This is where I would normally have talked myself out of it, because the wedding guest dress is the single worst value garment most of us own. You buy it for one day, you are photographed in it, and then you cannot wear it to the next wedding because the same people will be there.

So I sat down and worked out what that habit has actually cost me.

• The navy I wore to three weddings in a row and can never wear again, $210
• The dress I bought for one wedding and have not touched since, $260
• Hiring something for the day, twice, $180
• A dress from this collection, $100.99

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

They are a small boutique selling directly, which is most of the answer, and the rest is that it is on sale at the moment. Most of the collection is $100.99 instead of $229.00, and the discount stacks if you take more than one.

What I’d tell you if we were friends

If you had an invitation on the fridge and you asked me what to do about it, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that the list of rules you have in your head is mostly about one colour. Do not wear white. That is the rule. The rest of it is something we have invented between us, and it has quietly talked a generation of women into navy.

I would tell you to pick the colour first and the shape second. You already know which shapes suit you. You have probably never let yourself choose the colour you actually wanted.

I would tell you to order two if you have more than one wedding this year, because the discount stacks — two is ten per cent off, three is fifteen, four is twenty — and because the whole problem with this category is that you cannot wear the same one twice to the same crowd.

And I would tell you that delivery is free anywhere in Australia and there are thirty days to send it back, so you can order it, try it with the shoes you were planning to wear, and send it back if it is not right. Which is more than you get in a changing room on a Saturday.

If you have a wedding in the diary and a navy dress you have already decided on, it is worth ten minutes of your evening before you commit to the third row again.

The photographs last a great deal longer than the day does.

— Maggie