A letter from a reader

At 64, I had spent forty years choosing between dresses that pinched and dresses that looked like a nightie

The last thing I wrote was a note for the neighbour about Banjo's tablets while we were away, and it ran to two pages. I am not a writer, and I have never once thought it my business to tell another woman what she ought to wear.

But three women asked me about a dress on Cable Beach in Broome last week, and Graham has already told the story at the golf club and got the dress the wrong colour. So here it is, from me, once.

My mother had a rule. You never leave the house in anything that looks like a nightie. Loose meant lazy. Loose meant you had given up. A proper dress had darts and a waist and a belt, and if it pinched a bit, that was how you knew it was doing its job.

I have dressed by that rule my whole life. Which was fine in Sydney in July. It was less fine on a thirty-four degree day, sitting at a lunch in a fitted dress with a belt cutting into me, counting the minutes until I could get home and take it off.

A month before we flew to Broome I was packing, and I had laid out three fitted dresses and a belt on the bed. Graham looked at them, looked at me, and said it.

Di, it is going to be thirty-four degrees up there. Your mother is not coming.

He was right, and it annoyed me. Because every time I had tried anything loose, I had stood in front of the mirror and seen exactly what Mum would have seen. A nightie.

I did not decide to spend forty years being uncomfortable. Nobody does. You are handed a rule once, and it quietly becomes the way you get dressed.

How it happens

For women our age there seem to be only two piles in the wardrobe. The fitted things, that look like you made an effort and pinch you all afternoon. And the loose things, that are lovely and cool and that you would only ever wear around the house, because they look like you forgot to get dressed.

So on a hot day you pick the first pile, and you suffer. Or you pick the second pile, and you stay home.

And somewhere in your sixties you realise you have spent a great many summer afternoons tugging at a waistband, because of something your mother said in 1972.

Then Noeline turned up in blue

What changed my mind was Noeline from water aerobics at the Epping pool. She came to morning tea after class one hot Tuesday in a long, loose blue dress, and she did not look like she had come in her nightie. She looked like she had just stepped off a boat somewhere nice.

I said, Noeline, how are you not melting. She said, Dianne, I stopped wearing belts in summer when I turned sixty, and I have never once regretted it. Then she told me it was from a small Australian boutique called Thompson Sydney. I ordered mine that evening.

The one I chose is called the Wrenley, in the blue. It is a plain cornflower blue, a proper mid blue with a touch of violet in it, in a light fabric with a soft crinkled texture and fine lines running through it, so it never looks flat or cheap.

It has a V-neck with a neat binding, and one soft pleat running down the centre front from the point of the V, which is what stops it looking like a nightie. Short sleeves come to just above the elbow with a little turned cuff. There is no waist seam at all. It hangs straight from the shoulders, skims rather than clings, and falls to the middle of the calf. It moves when you walk. It also comes in light blue, orange, light green, pink and beige, and I will admit I have my eye on the orange.

What happened on Cable Beach

Graham and I went up to Broome for a week at the end of spring, before the heat sets in properly. On our second evening we walked down to Cable Beach for the sunset, the way everybody does, and it was still thirty-three degrees at five o'clock. I wore the Wrenley with my flat tan sandals, and took the sandals off at the sand.

Three women asked me about the dress before the sun was down. The first was a woman beside me at the waterline, up from Perth with her husband, who asked while the camel strings were coming back along the beach. The second was the young girl behind the bar at the beach shack, pouring Graham a beer. The third was Judith.

Judith ran the chemist next door to our practice for twenty-five years, and now spends the whole dry season in Broome and had not yet gone home. In all that time she never once passed a remark on what I had on. She looked me up and down on the sand and said, Dianne. You look like you are on holiday. You have never once looked like you were on holiday. Then she asked for the name of the shop.

What I noticed more than the compliments was that I forgot about it. I did not spend the evening tugging at a waistband or waiting to get home and change. I was too busy watching the sun go into the sea and trying to get Graham to put his phone away. When Judith sent the photos through that night, there I was at the water in blue, laughing, and I did not look like I had come out in my nightie. I looked cool and comfortable and dressed. Which I was.

Two days later I wore it again out to the red rocks at Gantheaume Point, in the full heat of the afternoon. Graham said it was the first holiday in forty years I had not complained about the heat once. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

Three things I have learned since

One. Loose is not the same as sloppy. It is all in the cut. One pleat in the right place and a dress that falls to the right length, and nobody thinks nightie for a moment.

Two. A hot day is not a test of character. I spent forty summers being uncomfortable to prove something to a woman who has been gone twenty years. She would have told me to put something cool on.

Three. A plain colour can do all the work. No print, no necklace, no scarf. I put it on, I put my sandals on, and I was ready.

About the price

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

The Wrenley is $55.95. It was $112.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a fitted dress with a belt I never once enjoyed wearing.

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 Kununurra had written, “It is forty degrees here half the year and I had given up on looking nice in it. This is the first dress I own that keeps me cool and still looks like I tried.” That was the one that decided it for me.

Judith has since bought the beige. Noeline, I am told, now owns three of them.

What I would tell you if we were friends

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

If you have the Cup lunch, a holiday or a Christmas do coming up this summer, and you already know you will be choosing between something that pinches and something you would only wear at home, 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 out into a hot afternoon cool and comfortable, and having nobody notice anything except how nice you look, that I had quietly given up on. I would not want you to give up on it too.

Two practical things. The spring sale is on now and the middle sizes go first. And with summer and the Christmas lunches coming, I would not leave it too long.

Forty years of choosing between a belt and a nightie. I wore blue on Cable Beach, and I was cool for the first time all summer.

Dianne