A letter from a reader

At 64, Graham told me every dress I own looks like it is still on the hanger. Twenty years of tents, and he was right

I have written this on the notepad by the phone, in between calls from Lyn, so if it jumps about that is why. I am not a writer, and it has never been my business what another woman puts on of a morning.

But three different women asked me about a dress at a retirement lunch down in the Riverina last Saturday, and I have told the story so many times since that it seemed easier to write it down once, properly.

The lunch was for Dr Hartley. For thirty years I sat at the front desk outside his door, and when he retired home to his family's old place outside Junee, his wife Ros invited the whole practice down for a garden lunch. Graham and I booked a motel in Wagga Wagga for the night. The evening before we left, I laid my good dress out on the bed. Graham looked at it, then at the three others in the wardrobe, and said it.

Di, every dress you own looks like it is still on the hanger.

The annoying thing is that he was right. Every one of them was the same shape. Straight down from the shoulders, loose all the way to the knee, no waist anywhere. Comfortable, sensible, and about as much shape as a pillowcase. I had been buying that dress, in one colour or another, for twenty years.

I did not set out to dress like that. Nobody does. It creeps up on you one sensible purchase at a time.

How it happens

Somewhere in your fifties the shops quietly decide that what you want most is to be covered. Every rack turns into the same loose shift, cut wide at the top and wide at the bottom, described as easy or relaxed, which is the polite word for not cut to anybody in particular.

And you go along with it, because the alternative on the next rack is something tight and short made for a woman of twenty-five. So it is comfortable or it is shapely. You pick comfortable. Everybody I know picked comfortable.

After twenty years of picking it, you forget there was ever a waist in your wardrobe at all.

Then Noeline walked into morning tea

What changed my mind was Noeline from water aerobics. Noeline is seventy-seven. At the end-of-term morning tea at the Epping pool she came in from the change rooms in a long green dress with a little twist at the front of the waist, and every head at the urn turned.

She did not look dressed up. She looked like a woman with a waist and somewhere to be. I asked her about it over the scones. It was from a small Australian boutique called Thompson Sydney, and the dress was called the Olive. I ordered mine that night, sitting up in bed with the iPad, before I could talk myself back into a pillowcase.

It is a midi in a soft sage green, with an abstract print of blush pink and rose markings swept all over it, so there is plenty to look at without anything shouting. It has a V-neck and short, loose sleeves that cover the tops of my arms.

And then there is the twist. Just under the bust, the fabric gathers into one soft twist at the front, and that is what gives the whole dress its shape. It comes in at the waist and then falls straight and easy all the way down past the calf. The fabric is light and it drapes rather than hangs. It moves when you walk, which none of my shifts have ever done.

What happened at Dr Hartley's farewell

I wore it with tan sandals and a small straw bag. Graham wore his good shirt, which is the same shirt as his other shirt but ironed.

Three women asked me where it was from before the speeches. The first was Ros, on the verandah steps, before I had even put my bag down. The second was the young woman carrying round the sandwiches. The third was Glenys.

Glenys took blood in the room next to my desk for twenty-five years, and in all that time I never once heard her say a kind word about anybody's clothes. She looked me up and down by the rose bushes and said she had not known I owned anything with a waist. Then she asked for the name of the shop. Coming from Glenys, I am having that framed.

What I noticed more than the compliments was how I stood. I did not hold my bag in front of me the whole afternoon. I did not fuss with anything. I sat on a folding chair in the sun, ate two of Ros's lemon slices, and forgot what I had on.

The Sunday after, I wore it to lunch under Lyn's jacaranda with flat sandals, and it felt just as right in a backyard as it had on a homestead lawn.

Three things I have learned since

One. Comfortable never had to mean shapeless. The Olive is every bit as easy to wear as my old shifts. It just has a waist, and a waist turns out to be the difference between looking dressed and looking covered.

Two. One detail does the work. It is only a twist at the front. No belt to fiddle with, no buttons, no ties to retie. You pull it on and the shape is already there.

Three. It goes both ways. Good earrings and sandals for a farewell lunch, or flat shoes for a Sunday in the backyard. Same dress, and it looked like I had chosen it both times.

About the price

I will be honest, the price is what made me suspicious.

The Olive is $54.95. It was $110.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because you can pay more than that at a department store for a shift dress that looks like every other shift dress.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is nobody in the middle 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 Cootamundra had written, “I have not worn anything with a waist in years. The twist does all the work and it is so comfortable. My daughter asked to borrow it the first weekend.” That was the one that decided it for me.

Glenys, I am told, ordered hers on the Monday.

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 the same loose dress in different colours, and you cannot remember the last time anything you wore had a waist, 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 in catching sight of yourself in a shop window and seeing a shape again, a shape you had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The spring sale is on now and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And with the Christmas lunches about to start, I would not leave it too long.

Twenty years of dresses shaped like pillowcases. There is a waist in my wardrobe again.

Dianne