A letter from a reader

At 67, I had stopped buying smart dresses because the good ones cost a fortune

I have never written anything like this before, and I should 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 two women at a lunch here in Cheshire a fortnight ago were quite certain the dress I had on was a designer label, and one of them asked, in a particular voice, where I had treated myself. I have explained it enough times since that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

What made me smile is that a year ago I had all but given up on smart dresses altogether.

The good ones cost a small fortune, and the cheap ones looked exactly like what they cost.

So I stopped. I told myself it did not matter, that nobody was really looking anyway, and I reached for the same dark trousers and a decent top for every occasion that asked for a little more. It is a quiet sort of giving up, and I did not even notice I had done it.

Then this one turned up, and it rather changed my mind about the whole thing.

How it happened

I had convinced myself that looking expensive and being expensive were the same thing. If a dress looked worth wearing, it had a price to match. And if it was cheap, it announced it, in the thin feel of it, the flat colour, the cut that seemed to fit nobody.

That is what the shops train you to believe, and for years I believed it. You pay a great deal for the nice one, or you make do with the sad one. There did not seem to be a third option, so I quietly settled for the trousers.

What I had wrong

It turns out that looking expensive has very little to do with what you spend. It is two things, and neither of them is money.

The first is the print. This one is a bold black pattern on a cream background, clean graphic lines, the sort of thing you would see in the window of a shop three times the price. It looks considered, as though somebody drew it on purpose.

The second is the cut. It is a shirt dress, with a proper collar and buttons down the front, and that alone reads smart and deliberate rather than thrown together. The A-line skims straight past the middle instead of clinging to it, so it looks tailored without holding you in anywhere.

Put those two together and the eye simply decides it was expensive. Mine did. So did everyone else's at that lunch.

The dress is called the Ellie

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

The dress is called the Ellie. A shirt dress in cream with a bold black graphic print running through it, a pointed collar, buttons down the front and neat roll-tab sleeves, falling in an easy A-line to about the knee. Nothing fussy. Just a dress that looks like it cost a great deal more than it did.

It is light and comfortable enough to wear all day, which at a long lunch matters more than you would think. And it is one of those dresses you can throw straight on and be ready in a few minutes, no fiddling, no arranging.

That is really all there is to it. It just happens to look like money.

What happened at the lunch

I wore it for the first time to a birthday lunch, with a pair of tan sandals.

Two women asked me where it was from before the starters had even arrived. One of them was Ann, who I have known since our children were at primary school, and who asked where I had treated myself in the voice she keeps for expensive things. I have decided not to tell her the price just yet.

What stayed with me more than the compliments, though, was that I did not think about it once. I did not tug at it, or wonder whether it had creased on the drive over. I sat down, ate a proper lunch, and forgot I had it on.

I have worn it to three more things since, and it has quietly become the dress I reach for when I want to look as though I have made a fuss without actually making one.

Three things I have learned since

One. Expensive is a look, not a receipt. A clean print and a proper collar will do more for you than a designer label nobody can see anyway.

Two. A shirt dress does the work for you. The collar and the buttons read smart on their own, so you can throw it on and still look as though you thought about it.

Three. The sizing is sensible. It runs from a small all the way to a 5XL, the same easy cut the whole way up, which I wish more places would bother with.

About the price

I will be honest, the price was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Ellie is £34.95. It was £69.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because two women had just assumed it was designer, and designer does not cost thirty-odd pounds.

There is no catch that I have found. It is a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store 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 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 sites, which if anything made me trust it more. One woman had written, "Everybody thinks it is designer. Nobody believes me when I say what I paid." 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 quietly given up on smart dresses because the good ones cost a fortune and the cheap ones look it, it is worth ten minutes of an evening to have a look. That middle you decided did not exist, the one that looks expensive without costing it, turns out to be real after all.

Not because a dress changes anything. It does not. But there is something in walking into a room feeling put together that I had stopped expecting, and I would rather you did not stop expecting it either.

The sale is on now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. Once the summer stock has sold through, that is it until next year.

Nobody at that lunch believed what I paid. I have decided to leave it that way.

Maggie