A letter from a reader

At 67, I had spent years disappearing into shapeless dark dresses

I have never written one of these before, and I nearly did not, because it is not the sort of thing I usually own up to in public. But I have now explained it to enough friends that writing it down seemed easier than telling the story again.

Four different women asked me about this dress at an exhibition here in Cheshire on Saturday, and after the fourth one I rather gave up trying to be modest about it.

For years I had been buying the same thing without ever quite deciding to. A dark shift, loose from the shoulders down, the kind the shops call easy. My wardrobe was full of them, black and charcoal and navy, and every single one hung off me like a pillowcase.

Somewhere in all those dark, shapeless years I had forgotten I had a waist at all.

It creeps up on you. You reach for the loose dark thing because it asks nothing of you, and then one afternoon you catch sight of yourself in a shop window and there is just a column standing there. No shape to it. Nothing you would call you.

I had seen a woman wearing it at a garden lunch a few weeks before, and I could not stop looking, not at her, at the dress. She told me where it was from, I wrote it on the back of a receipt, and one evening when I was feeling braver than usual I ordered it before I could talk myself out of it.

The dress is called the Marcelline

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

The Marcelline is a midi with a proper fitted bodice and a full, gathered skirt, in a bold geometric print, warm rusts and mustard and teal and cream, the sort of thing that looks like a piece of modern art you can wear. It has fine shoulder straps, so on a cooler day I throw a little cardigan over the top, but the dress does all the talking on its own.

The clever part is the shape of it. The bodice nips in and holds you at the middle, and then the skirt swishes out over the hips and moves when you move, so instead of a column there is a waist, and a bit of grace to the whole thing. It is light and it stays cool all day, which in the last few weeks has mattered more than I expected.

What happened at the exhibition

I wore it for the first time to the exhibition, with flat sandals and my good earrings.

Four women asked me where it was from before the afternoon was out. One of them was Ann, who I have known since our children were small and who has never once remarked on anything I have worn. She looked at me twice, which she does not do, and asked where on earth I had found it.

But the compliments were not really the thing. The thing was that for the first time in an age I did not feel like the beige woman at the edge of the room, keeping out of the photographs. I stood in the middle of it in a dress with a shape and a colour, and I felt like somebody who had got dressed on purpose.

The next morning I put it straight back on to walk the dog across the field, and felt every bit as much myself in it. It has quietly become the thing I reach for.

Three things I have learned since

One. A waist changes everything. I had spent years believing loose was the only kind thing to do to myself. It turns out a bodice that holds you and a skirt that moves away from you is far kinder, and far more comfortable, than a sack that hangs off you all day.

Two. Colour is not just for the young. After a decade of dark I had forgotten what it does. A print like this one lifts your whole face, and it does the work so you do not have to. Nobody looks at you and thinks about your age. They look at the dress.

Three. It goes anywhere. Flat sandals for the shops, a heel and earrings for an evening, a little cardigan over the straps when it turns cool. It is one dress that behaves like several, and it has honestly earned its space on the rail.

About the price

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

The Marcelline is £36.95. It was £74.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because you can walk into any high street shop and pay a good deal more for something that looks lovely on the hanger and does nothing at all for you once it is on.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is nobody taking a cut in the middle, and they run a summer sale to move the season's stock before it turns.

I did what I imagine you are doing now 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. The same things kept coming up. One woman had written, "It gave me a waist back and I have never had so many compliments on one dress." That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the garden with a cup of tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have spent years disappearing into the same dark, shapeless dresses, not because you like them but because they were the easy thing to reach for, then it is worth ten minutes of an evening to have a look.

Not because a dress fixes anything. It does not. But there is a small, quiet thing in catching sight of yourself and recognising a shape, a colour, a person you had rather given up on, and I would not want you to give up on it either.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And once the summer stock has sold through, that is it until next year.

I have a waist again, and I did not have to lose an ounce to find it.

Maggie