A letter from a reader

At 64, I had decided I was fifty years too old for anything with cherries on it

The last thing I wrote that anybody else read was a sympathy card, and I needed two goes at that, so please forgive me if this wanders. 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 different women asked me about a jumpsuit at a long lunch up in the Hunter Valley on Saturday, and I have now told the story so many times, twice more on the drive home, that it seemed easier to sit down and write it out properly.

It started at the shops in August. I was in Macquarie Centre looking for a birthday present for my granddaughter, and on the way out I passed a rail of pink gingham with little red cherries all over it. I picked one up without thinking and held it against myself in the mirror. And then I heard myself say it, out loud, to nobody.

Dianne, you are sixty-four, not six.

I put it straight back. Then I walked to the car feeling oddly flat, and when I got home I looked in the wardrobe and understood why. Navy. Oatmeal. Stone. A sensible grey cardigan for every day of the week. Nothing in there was wrong, exactly. There was just nothing in there that looked like it had ever had a nice afternoon.

I did not decide to stop wearing anything cheerful. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody sits down one day and gives up on pink. It goes quietly, one appropriate purchase at a time, until you are telling yourself off in a shopping centre mirror.

How it happens

Somewhere around sixty, the word appropriate moves in and never leaves. You start dressing for what people might think rather than for how you feel, and the shops are more than happy to help you do it.

Go and look at what is on offer for women our age. Muted this, neutral that, all of it cut to go unnoticed. Anything with a bit of fun in it is on the rail for twenty-five-year-olds, in a shape made for twenty-five-year-olds, so of course we decide it is not for us.

And after a while you do not even notice you are doing it. The grandkids get the cheerful colours. You get the navy. Nobody says anything, which is rather the point.

What I had wrong

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

I thought the print was the problem. Cherries, gingham, pink, all of it, I had filed under childish. Then on Father’s Day, Graham’s sister Lyn turned up to the barbecue in a bright cherry-print dress, seventy-one years old, and looked better than anybody in the backyard. When I said I could never get away with it, she laughed at me and asked who on earth had told me I had to stop having fun.

I did not have an answer. I thought about it all week.

What I worked out is that a cheerful print on a girlish cut looks girlish. The same print on a relaxed, grown-up shape reads completely differently. It does not look like you are trying to be young. It looks like you are enjoying yourself, which is a different thing altogether, and nobody ever tells you that.

The one I bought is called the Cherry Picnic Jumpsuit

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

It is a relaxed one-piece in a soft pink and white gingham, with little pairs of red cherries scattered over it, not crowded, just a few here and there, like somebody dropped them on the way to a picnic. There is a bib front and two pink straps, and it slips on in seconds. It sounds like a lot on paper. On, it just looks easy.

It is soft and lightweight and properly breezy, which with the days warming up the way they have been has mattered more than I expected. The shape is gently defined without clinging anywhere, so it looks pulled together without you having to hold anything in.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just a cheerful thing cut for a grown woman, which turns out to be surprisingly hard to find.

What happened at the winery

Jenny from over the road and her husband Phil were celebrating their anniversary, and the four of us drove up to the Hunter for a long lunch at a little winery among the vines. I wore the jumpsuit with flat sandals and a white top underneath, and I very nearly went back inside to change before we left.

Three women asked me where it was from. Three. The woman at the next table, the young girl pouring at the cellar door, and a lady in the queue for the bathroom who told me she had one exactly like it in her head but had never been brave enough to buy it.

And Jenny, who has lived across the road for eleven years and has never once passed comment on anything I have worn, looked at me over her glass and said I looked like the only person there who had come to enjoy herself. From Jenny, that is practically a standing ovation.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I stopped thinking about it. The lunch went on for three and a half hours, as they do, and I did not tug at anything or wonder once whether I looked silly. I just had a lovely afternoon in the sun.

On the Sunday I put it straight back on to take Banjo round the block. Graham asked if we were going out again. I said no. I just liked it.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from a small 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. Pink is not the enemy. A soft pink near your face does something navy never will. I had avoided it for twenty years on the grounds that it was for little girls. It is not. It is for anyone who likes it.

Three. It goes both ways. Sandals and a white top for a long lunch, or exactly as it is for the shops and the dog. And when the evening cools, a light cardigan over the top and nobody would guess it had been round the block with Banjo that morning.

About the price

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

The Cherry Picnic Jumpsuit is $79.95. It was $160.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because you can walk into any shopping centre and pay more than that for something beige that will have given up by Christmas.

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 as the first summer stock comes 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. One woman from Maitland had written, “I bought it thinking I would only wear it around the house, and I have had it on at every lunch since. People smile at me in it.” That was the one that decided it for me.

Lyn has already asked for the link. I have told her she can have it after I have ordered my second one.

What I would tell you if we were friends

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

If you have been walking past the cheerful things for years because some little voice says you are too old for them, it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look. Not because a jumpsuit will change your life. It will not. But there is something in catching yourself in a shop window and looking like you are having a nice day 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 now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And once this first run of summer stock is gone, it is gone.

I am sixty-four, and I own cherries now.

Dianne