A letter from a reader

At 67, everything comfortable I owned was something I would not answer the door in

I ought to say before anything else that I have never written a piece like this in my life, and that I am not a writer, nor a woman who goes about telling other women what they ought to wear.

But three different women asked me about a set of clothes at the optician’s on Thursday morning, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started with my sister June, who has a key and no habit of phoning first. Last month she let herself in while I was upstairs, and I did what I have done for years whenever the doorbell goes. I looked down at what I had on, and I went to change before I came down.

It took you ten minutes to come downstairs, and you have changed your trousers.

She was right, and it was worse than she knew. I had two wardrobes without ever deciding to. The comfortable things, the bobbled jogging bottoms and the old fleece with paint on the cuff, that I lived in and would not be seen in. And the decent things, that came off the minute I got home, like a uniform at the end of a shift. Not one single thing in the house was both.

How it happens

Nobody decides to have house clothes. It happens quietly.

A jumper bobbles, and instead of leaving, it gets demoted. Some jogging bottoms arrive one Christmas for around the house, and around the house is where they stay. And the shops do not help, because for women our age they stock two kinds of clothes. The proper ones, that need thinking about and holding in and managing all day. And the giving-up ones, grey marl and elastic and nothing else, that are comfortable precisely because nobody expected you to be seen in them.

So the comfortable clothes become a secret. You wear them most of your life and show them to nobody, and you plan your whole day around who might catch you in them. When you say it out loud it sounds mad. I planned my afternoons around a doorbell.

What I had wrong

I assumed that was simply what comfort looked like. If it felt like a hug it would look like a sack, and the best I could do was keep the sack indoors.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see the flaw in that. The problem was never that comfortable clothes exist. It is that nothing comfortable I owned had been designed to be looked at. No two pieces of it belonged to each other. Of course it read as giving up. It was odds and ends, worn in private, and it looked exactly like what it was.

The set is called the Lily

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

It is a two piece set. A relaxed sweatshirt and wide leg trousers, both cut from the same soft plaid, big gentle blocks of deep red and grey that blur into each other rather than sharp lines. And along the seams, around the neck, down the sleeves and the legs, there is a fine white line of piping, which sounds like nothing and is the whole trick. It is the difference between fabric that happens to be on you and an outfit that has been finished.

The rest is quietly right. The waistband is soft and does not dig, even sat down, even after a big lunch. The pockets are proper pockets, and the big ones on the front of the legs take a phone and keys and the dog treats with room to spare. It is warm without being heavy, and when the weather turns properly it goes under a coat without bunching up.

What happened at the optician’s

I had my eye test on Thursday morning, and I wore it out of the house without thinking twice, which at the time did not strike me as remarkable.

Three women asked me about it before I had even chosen frames. The lady sat next to me in the waiting room wanted to know if it was as warm as it looked. Another caught me at the little mirror and asked whether the top and trousers had come together or whether I had matched them myself, and seemed genuinely pleased when I said together. And the woman doing my fitting held up the mirror and said the new glasses had a lot to live up to.

The next morning I put it straight back on to take the dog out across the field. And when the postman knocked with a parcel, I answered the door on the first knock, in the clothes I had been comfortable in all morning, which sounds like nothing and is not.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from a UK 6/8 to a 16/18, and it is the same relaxed shape the whole way through, not a different outfit once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. The pockets earn their keep. Phone, keys, treats, a tissue, and both hands still free for the lead. The big front ones close with a flap, so nothing has fallen out in a field yet, and I have given it every chance.

Three. Nobody can tell it is the comfortable option. Because the two pieces match, it reads as an outfit somebody chose. Only I know it feels like the things I used to hide in. That gap, between how it feels and how it reads, is the whole reason I am writing this.

About the price

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

The Lily is £49.95 at the moment. It was £100.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because that is two pieces for less than I have paid for one jumper that went bobbly 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 the sale to move the season’s stock while the cold weather is still in front of us.

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 had written, “Wore it to my daughter’s for the whole weekend and lived in it. It washes well and it does not look like loungewear.” That was the one that decided it for me.

I have not bought jogging bottoms since, which June finds funnier than I do.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat with a pot of tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

Think about what you have on right now, reading this at home. If it is something you would quietly not answer the door in, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at this set. Not because an outfit will change your life. It will not. But there is something in being comfortable and fit to be seen at the same time, in your own kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday, that I had stopped believing was available to me.

Two practical things. The sale is on now and the first autumn stock is already going, so the middle sizes will disappear first. And it is a set, so there is nothing to get right. It comes out of the bag already going together.

These days I answer the door on the first knock.

Maggie