A letter from a reader

At 64, my husband pointed out that the only dress I owned was the one I wear to funerals

I have started this four times on the back of an electricity bill envelope, so you will have to forgive me if it wanders. I am not a writer, and I have never been the sort of woman who tells another woman what to put on in the morning. I am only telling you what happened to me.

But three different women asked me about a dress at an open garden weekend up in Leura, and I have explained it enough times since, at the shops and over the back fence, that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started a fortnight before we went. Graham had booked two nights at a guesthouse up the mountains for our anniversary, the spring open gardens were on, and I was packing the overnight bag. He wandered in, looked over my shoulder into the wardrobe for a while, and then he said it.

Di, the only dress in there is the one you wear to funerals.

I told him to go and check the barbecue, and then I looked properly, and he was right. Jeans in three shades of blue, white shirts, a navy jumper, a grey one, and one black dress in dry cleaning plastic that comes out for the saddest days of the year. Twenty years of it. Not one thing in there you would put on to walk round a garden in spring.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to become a woman with one dress. It happens quietly, one sensible pair of jeans at a time, until one day your husband looks over your shoulder and there it is.

How it happens

I used to wear dresses all the time. In my twenties I had a blue sundress I wore to every picnic and every barbecue for three summers running, and I never once thought about it.

What changed was not me. It was the shops.

Go and look at what they make for women our age. It is either mother of the bride, all stiff and shiny and fussy, or it is a shapeless thing in a dark colour that is supposed to be forgiving. Neither of them looks like somebody you would actually know. Neither of them looks like you on a Saturday.

So you go back to jeans, because jeans at least feel like yourself. Comfortable and me, or dressed up and somebody else. After a while it seemed I could have one, never both, and I stopped trying the dresses on at all.

What I had wrong

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

I had decided I was simply a jeans person. Some women suit a dress, I would say, and I am not one of them.

It turns out that was never the dresses.

What I loved about my jeans was that they asked nothing of me. They were soft, they looked lived in, and nobody thought I was going anywhere special. Every dress I had tried in years felt like the opposite, a costume, something you had to wear well. A dress that is soft and relaxed, that goes over your head in seconds, in a colour as easy as an old pair of jeans, reads as you and not as an occasion. That is the whole difference, and it took me until 64 to find it out.

Then Carol turned up in one

Carol was the practice nurse at the medical centre for most of the thirty years I was on the front desk, and we still have coffee in Epping every second Wednesday. The week before the trip she walked in wearing a blue dress with big cream flowers up the front, and before I could stop myself I reached over and felt the skirt, because I was certain it was her good denim.

It was not. It was soft and light as anything, and she laughed at me and told me where it was from. I ordered mine that evening with nine days to spare.

The dress is called the Belle

It is from Thompson Sydney, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

The dress is called the Belle. A sleeveless midi with a plain round neck, in the soft washed blue of a favourite pair of jeans, with big cream flowers and curling stems climbing up the front of it like something off an old garden gate. It is a proper boho print, but it is only the two colours, so it never shouts.

It is soft and lightweight, and it stays comfortable right through a warm afternoon. The fit is relaxed, so there is room to sit and stroll and bend without giving it a second thought. And it is one piece, which I cannot tell you enough. It goes on over your head and that is you dressed. No top to match, no belt to argue with.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just a dress that somebody thought about.

What happened in Leura

I wore it on the Saturday with my flat sandals and a cream cardigan for when the mist came in, and we did five gardens before lunch.

Three women asked me about it. One by the rhododendrons, one in the queue for the Devonshire tea, and the third was Graham's sister Lyn, who had come up with her husband and who has not commented on a single thing I have worn in forty years.

She looked me up and down by the car and said I looked like I owned one of the gardens. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I forgot about it. Up and down stone steps, crouching at every garden bed to read the little plant labels, sitting on a damp bench with a scone in my hand. I did not think about what I had on once, which is exactly how I used to feel in my jeans.

I wore it again on the Tuesday to walk Banjo round the oval, and felt completely myself in it. That is the rarest sort of dress. The one you can wear round somebody else's beautiful garden and then out with a cavoodle at seven in the morning, and feel right either way.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from an S all the way to a 5XL, and it is the same relaxed cut the whole way up, not a different shape once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. There is nothing to put together. It slips on in seconds and it is the whole outfit. On a morning when you are running late for school pickup, that matters more than any compliment.

Three. It goes both ways. Flat sandals and a cardigan for a day in the mountains, or dressed up a little with my good earrings for a birthday lunch. You would never know it was the same dress.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Belle is $65.95. It was $132.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because you can walk into any shopping centre and pay more than that for a dress you will wear to one wedding and never again.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they run a spring sale to make room for the summer stock coming in.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. Real people, mixed opinions, mostly very good.

Then I ordered a second one to keep for best, which Graham says defeats the whole point of this letter.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sharing a pot of tea at my kitchen bench and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have spent the last twenty years in jeans, not because you love them but because every dress in the shops felt like fancy dress, 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 putting on a dress on a spring morning and still recognising yourself that I 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 at the moment, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And with the warmer days on their way, the first of the summer stock is already going out the door.

The funeral dress has gone back in its plastic, where it belongs.

Dianne