A letter from a reader

Forty years ago a shop assistant told me orange was not my colour, and I believed her until last month

You will have to forgive me if this reads a little clumsily. I have never written anything of this kind before, I am not a writer, and telling other women what they ought to wear is a habit I have managed to avoid my whole life.

But three different women asked me about a cardigan at the greengrocer’s on Saturday morning, and by the time I had got home and put the shopping away I had explained it so many times that it seemed simpler to write the whole thing down once, properly.

To explain it I have to go back a very long way, to a changing room in a department store that no longer exists. I was holding a jumper the colour of marmalade up against myself, rather pleased with it, and the assistant looked at me over her glasses and said it quite kindly,

Orange is not your colour, dear.

I put the jumper back. And here is the part I find hardest to explain. I believed her. One remark from a woman whose name I never knew, and I spent the next forty years steering around an entire colour as though it belonged to somebody else. Browns, navies, a careful dark green at Christmas. Never orange. I never once tested it. It had stopped being her opinion and quietly become one of my facts.

How it happens

Nobody decides to obey a rule like that for forty years. It happens quietly.

You fold the remark in with all the other sensible things you know, and you shop accordingly. And the shops make it terribly easy to keep that sort of rule, because the rails for women our age are full of the shades that break no rules at all. Stone, navy, grey, that endless greige. You reach for them because they are safe, and everybody agrees with your choice by saying nothing, which is rather how these rules are enforced.

A rule you never test does not feel like a rule. It feels like knowing yourself. I would have told you, quite sincerely, that I was simply not an orange person, in the same voice I would have told you my shoe size.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect that assistant had it wrong too.

It was never the colour. It was the version of the colour. A hard, flat orange in something thin and shiny is a lot to ask of any face, mine included, and that is probably what she was looking at all those years ago.

But the same orange behaves completely differently when it is softened. Warm it up, brush a muted red and a dusty blue through it in a gentle check, put it in something with a bit of softness to it, and it stops shouting and starts to glow. It flatters the way candlelight flatters. And it helps enormously if the thing itself is easy, a cardigan you throw on over jeans, rather than some grand occasion piece you have to audition for. The colour reads as warmth, not as a statement. That distinction took me until 67 to work out, and it cost me forty autumns of wearing brown.

The cardigan is called the Elise

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. My sister June sent me the page, with no comment, which is how she gives advice.

It is a warm orange, proper marmalade, with a soft check running through it in a muted red and a dusty blue, so the colour never gets loud. There is a neat fold-over collar that sits the way a shirt collar does, and a row of small pearly buttons down the front, so you can wear it open over a plain top or done up to the collar like a little jacket. The texture is soft and slightly brushed, the sleeves finish in deep soft cuffs, and it sits easily over jeans or trousers without clinging anywhere. They do it in eight colours, but it was the orange I had been walking past for forty years.

And the whole trick of it is this. The colour does all the work. You put it on over the plainest things you own, an old white top and jeans in my case, and the entire outfit suddenly looks decided. The collar and the buttons make it read as something you chose rather than something you reached for. I had spent forty years believing orange would wear me. It turns out it was waiting to do me a favour.

What happened at the greengrocer’s

I wore it to the greengrocer’s on Saturday morning with my jeans, because that is what it is for. Not a wedding. The Saturday shop.

Three women asked me about it between the apples and the till. The lady beside me at the veg crates asked where it was from and held her hand against the sleeve while I told her. The girl on the till, who is perhaps 25, said that colour really suited me, and I nearly looked over my shoulder to see who she meant. And a woman I half know from the next road caught me up outside to say she had seen the cardigan from across the shop and come over specially.

I have done that Saturday shop in careful, correct colours for more years than I will admit to, and in all that time nobody has once remarked on anything I was wearing. Forty years of nobody being wrong about me, and one orange cardigan to find it out. The labrador got a longer walk than usual that afternoon, because I did not particularly want to take it off and go home.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from a UK 8/10 all the way to a 22/24, and it is the same relaxed, easy shape the whole way through, not a different garment once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. The collar and the buttons earn their keep. Open over a plain top it is a cardigan, done up to the collar it is very nearly a jacket, and either way it looks deliberate. It has quietly replaced the smart jacket I used to make myself wear when I wanted to look like I was coping.

Three. Nobody else is keeping your rules. That assistant retired decades ago, if she is with us at all, and she certainly was not standing at the greengrocer’s enforcing anything. The only person still running her rule was me. I would give that thought a minute, because I doubt orange is the only rule of this kind being kept.

About the price

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

The Elise is £41.95. It was £84.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because anything with a collar and buttons that looks this deliberate would cost you a good deal more on the high street. 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, “I bought the orange thinking it might be too much for me and it is not. I have worn it every day for a fortnight and been stopped in the street twice.” That was the one that decided it for me.

My sister June, who sent me the page in the first place, has already announced she is having the red one. She did not ask. Sisters do not.

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 of the colour you were talked out of. Most of us have one, and we can usually remember exactly who did the talking. If yours is orange, or red, or anything with some warmth in it, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at this cardigan. Not because a cardigan will change your life. It will not. But there is something in catching sight of yourself in a shop window and thinking, well, she looks cheerful, that I had done without for a very long time, and I would rather you did not do without it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on now and the first autumn stock is already going, so the middle sizes will disappear first. And if orange truly is not for you, no assistant required, they do a blue and a green and five others besides. But the orange is the one I have, and the one that gets asked about.

It turns out orange was my colour all along.

Maggie