A letter from a reader

At 64, I had not worn white since my wedding day. Forty-one years of navy, in case something spilled

The last thing I wrote that anybody else read was our two names on the Cup sweep at the bowls club, and the horse I drew is still running. So I am not a writer, and it has never been my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on.

But three different women asked me about a dress at the Caulfield Cup lunch last Saturday, and I have now told the story often enough that it seemed easier to write it down once, properly.

Graham and I were up at Yamba for a spring week with my friend Sandra, who ran the front office at my old medical centre for twenty years before she and Kev retired up there. Her bowls club does a Cup lunch every year, with the fashions on the field out on the verandah. I had packed what I always pack. Navy. Graham stood at the wardrobe in Sandra's spare room, looked at the three navy things hanging there, and said it.

Di, you have been dressing for a spill for forty years.

He was not wrong, which is the most annoying thing a husband can be. Navy, black, a charcoal top for special. Everything chosen so that if a grandchild wiped a hand on me or the gravy went sideways, nobody would ever know. The last time I wore white, I was walking down an aisle.

How it happens

Nobody decides to stop wearing white. It goes quietly, the way most things go.

First it is the babies, and anything pale is ruined by Tuesday. Then it is school lunches and grandchildren and a husband who waves the sauce bottle when he is telling a story. Somewhere in there you start buying dark things on purpose, and after a while you forget it was ever a choice.

And the shops do not help. Go and look for a white dress for a woman of sixty-four. It is either something see-through and floaty made for a twenty-year-old on a beach, or something stiff and bridal that you would be frightened to sit down in. So you buy the navy one. Again.

Then Lyn ate a meat pie in white

The thing that actually changed my mind was Graham's sister Lyn, at the footy final barbecue a few weeks before. Lyn is seventy-one. She turned up in a long white dress with roses on it, sat on a camp chair and ate a meat pie with sauce, and did not look down once. I asked her, half joking, whether she was not terrified. She just shrugged.

It is a dress, Di. It goes in the wash.

I asked where it was from on the way to the car. It was a small Australian boutique called Thompson Sydney, and the dress was called the Barbara. I ordered mine that night from the passenger seat, before I could talk myself back into navy.

It is a long, easy maxi in a clean white, painted all over with big soft watercolour roses in pale pink and a deep raspberry. That is the clever part. It is not a blank white that shows every crumb. The roses do the work, so it reads as fresh and pretty rather than precious.

It has a V-neck, three-quarter sleeves that cover the tops of my arms, and a soft gathered seam up high, just under the bust, so the skirt falls away from the middle instead of clinging to it. It goes right down to the ankle. That is all there is to it, and it is exactly enough.

What happened at the Cup lunch

I wore it with flat tan sandals and my old straw hat. Graham wore the same shirt he has worn to every Cup Day since the nineties.

Three women asked me where it was from. The first was the woman at the next table, before the entrées had come out. The second was the young girl collecting the glasses. The third was Marlene.

Marlene has judged the fashions on the field at that club for nineteen years, and Sandra had warned me in the car that she has never said a kind word about anybody's outfit in all that time. She looked me up and down by the verandah rail and said I was the only woman there who looked like spring. Sandra nearly dropped her champagne.

What I noticed most, though, was what I did not do. I did not check my lap every five minutes. I did not hold my plate out at arm's length. I ate a sausage roll and a pavlova in a white dress and I forgot about it completely, which I am not sure I have ever done in my life.

The next morning I put it straight back on for a walk round the headland with sand between my toes, and felt entirely myself in it.

Three things I have learned since

One. White is not the risk I thought it was. Not this white, anyway. With the roses all over it, it does not feel like something you have to tiptoe about in. It feels like spring.

Two. The shape is half the battle. Gathered up high and loose all the way down, it skims instead of clings, and the sleeves cover what I like covered without looking like I am hiding anything.

Three. It goes both ways. A hat and good earrings for the races, or flat sandals for the beach walk the next morning. Same dress, and it felt right both times.

About the price

I will be honest, the price was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Barbara is $76.95. It was $153.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because you can pay double that in a department store for something that looks like a tablecloth by Christmas.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so nobody in the middle is taking a cut, and they run a spring sale to move the season's stock. I read the reviews before I ordered, the way I imagine you are doing now. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if anything made me trust it more. One woman from Grafton had written, “I had not worn white in years and I was nervous, but the roses make it so soft. I have had more compliments in this than anything I own.” That was the one that decided it for me.

They do the same dress in about twenty other prints as well, which is how Sandra ended up ordering one for herself before we had even left Yamba.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were having a cuppa on the back verandah and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If your wardrobe is a row of navy and black, and you cannot honestly remember choosing any of it, it is worth ten minutes of an evening to go and have a look.

Not because a dress will change your life. It will not. But there is something about walking into a room in white at sixty-four, roses and all, that I had quietly decided was not for me any more, and I would rather you did not decide that too.

Two practical things. The spring sale is on now and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And Cup Day is only a week or so away, with all the Christmas lunches straight after, so I would not leave it too long.

Forty-one years of navy. I wore white to the races, and I ate the pavlova.

Dianne