A letter from a reader

At 67, I packed the same three safe outfits for every holiday we took

I have never written anything like this before, and I want to say at the start that I am not a writer and I am not in the habit of telling other women what to wear.

But three different women asked me about a dress on the seafront at Llandudno, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started the week before we went, with the photo box out on the kitchen table. I was looking for a picture of the grandchildren and instead I found ten years of holiday photographs, and I made the mistake of actually looking at them.

Lovely places, every one. And me, dressed for the post office in all of them.

Navy trousers, the beige top, the cardigan in case. The same three safe outfits, packed every single year, photographed in front of harbours and castles and sunsets, all of it wasted on a woman dressed for popping out to buy stamps.

How a suitcase packs itself

Nobody chooses the same three outfits for ten years. The suitcase chooses them for you, one safe decision at a time.

Holiday clothes in the shops are made for the beach at twenty-five. Straps, thigh, cheesecloth. Nothing in those rails is for a woman who wants to walk a promenade, eat fish and chips out of the paper, and look nice in her daughter's photographs.

So safe wins. Safe always wins. And you come home every year with photographs you quietly do not love, and you blame the wind or the light or your hair, and you pack the same case the next year.

Then Jean had her week in Devon

Last September, Jean came back off the coach trip to Devon and her photographs were different. She looked wonderful in every single one, and I finally asked her outright what had changed.

One dress, she said. She had taken one proper holiday dress instead of three safe outfits, from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. Mine is called the Poppy, and I ordered it the week before Llandudno, feeling faintly ridiculous about ordering a dress for a holiday at my age. I got over that quickly.

It is a long, light blue dress covered in tiny flowers, packed close like a mosaic, so it reads as gently cheerful rather than loud. The sleeves come to the elbow, so my arms are covered without a cardigan. The seam sits under the bust and the skirt flows full from there, which means it skims everything and catches the sea breeze like it was designed for exactly that, because I suspect it was.

And it weighs nothing, folds to nothing, and comes out of the case looking pressed. A holiday dress that behaves on holiday.

What happened on the seafront

I wore it the whole first day. Promenade, pier, fish and chips on the front, the works.

Three women asked me where it was from. One of them was Ann, who was with us and who I have known since our children were at primary school, and who has never once commented on anything I have worn. She asked in the queue for ice creams, which for Ann is practically an outburst.

But the part I keep coming back to is the photographs. My husband took one of me by the railings, wind in the skirt, ice cream in hand, and for the first time in ten years I looked at a holiday photograph of myself and said, oh, I like that one. I had forgotten what that felt like.

It came out again two more times that week, and it has done two garden afternoons since we got home. It is not really a holiday dress. It is a good dress that happens to travel.

Three things I have learned since

One. One good dress beats three safe outfits. It took less room in the case than the cardigan, and it did more for the whole week than everything else combined.

Two. Covered can still be cool. The elbow sleeves and the length keep me covered the way I like, and the light flowing cut means I was never once too warm walking the front in full sun.

Three. The sizing is honest. It runs from a UK 8/10 all the way to a 22/24, the same easy cut the whole way up, not a different dress once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

About the price

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

The Poppy is £36.95. It was £74.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because you can spend more than that on the high street on one of those safe outfits that never make the photographs.

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 summer sale to shift the season's stock before it turns.

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, "Took it away for a week and wore it four times. Light, cool, and I have never had so many compliments on holiday." That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat on a bench on the front with a bag of chips and you asked me, this is what I would say.

Before your next trip, get last year's holiday photographs out and look at what you are wearing in them. If it is the same things as the year before, and the year before that, then your suitcase has been packing itself, the way mine was, and it has not been packing for you.

Not because a dress changes anything. It does not. But holidays are what we get the camera out for, and being glad to be in the pictures is worth more than the safety of the navy trousers ever was.

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

This year's photographs could be postcards, and I am in all of them.

Maggie