A letter from a reader

At 68, I stopped packing the summer dresses away

Every October, for as long as I can remember, I have performed the same small funeral. The summer clothes go into a box, the box goes on top of the wardrobe, and I spend the next five months in the same three dark things.

I am not one for writing to shops about it. But three different women asked me about a dress at the church craft fair, and I have now explained the trick enough times that writing it down once seemed the sensible option.

Because here is what the box on the wardrobe actually is, if you look at it honestly.

Every scrap of colour I own, in storage for half the year.

The greens, the florals, the things that get comments. Boxed up precisely when the sky turns grey and you could use them most. And in their place, five months of navy, black and that brown jumper, on rotation, like a bus timetable.

Nobody decides to dress like a filing cabinet from October to March. That is the bit worth saying plainly. It follows from one assumption we all make without checking it, which is that summer clothes are for summer.

The assumption nobody checks

A sleeveless dress, we have all agreed, is a warm-weather item. Five degrees outside, into the box it goes.

Except nobody actually examined the thing. A sleeveless midi dress is, if you look at it with a cold eye, a pinafore. And a pinafore is not summer clothing. A pinafore is a LAYER, and layers are precisely what autumn is made of.

The shops will not tell you this, for the obvious reason that they would rather sell you an autumn wardrobe as well as a summer one.

What I had wrong

I assumed that if you wanted to layer a dress for winter, a dress with sleeves would do it better. More coverage, surely.

It turns out that is exactly backwards.

Try pulling a sleeved dress on over a roll neck and you get a wrestling match at both wrists and bulk all down your arms. A SLEEVELESS dress layers clean. The roll neck does the arms and the neck, the dress does the rest, and nothing bunches anywhere. The dresses I had been boxing up were the best layering pieces I owned, and the dresses I kept out were the worst.

The dress is called the Sara

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

Mine is the Sara. A sleeveless midi in a proper soft green, with little daisies worked through the fabric in the same colour, so there is something to look at without it shouting. I bought it in June for the summer, and it never made it into the box.

The cut is the reason the trick works so well on this one. It falls straight from the chest, no waist seam, so it skims over a roll neck without pulling or sitting oddly anywhere. The midi length meets thick tights with room to spare, so you are covered from chin to boot. And the green, I promise you, looks better against a grey November sky than it ever did in July. Colour works hardest in the months there is none about.

The formula, for the record: the Sara, a cream roll neck, thick tights, ankle boots. Two minutes, and you are the best-dressed woman at the craft fair. I have tested this.

What happened at the craft fair

I wore it exactly like that to the church craft fair, on a cold grey Saturday.

Three different women asked me about it between the tombola and the jam. One of them was Freda, who has run the wool stall since before decimalisation and does not hand out remarks.

She asked me if the dress was new. I have owned it since June. It is not the dress that is new. It is the trick.

What I noticed more than the compliments was how warm I was. Roll neck, dress, tights, boots is more layers than my usual jumper-and-trousers arrangement, and every layer is doing a job. I stood on that cold parish floor for three hours and never once thought about it.

The next morning I wore the same formula to the allotment to lift the last of the leeks, and it was just as right for that, which is the real test of anything.

Three things worth knowing

One. Sleeveless layers better than sleeved. No bunching at the wrists, no bulk down the arms, nothing to wrestle. The roll neck underneath does the warmth and the dress goes on over it as easily as it does over bare arms in July.

Two. One dress, two wardrobes. Bare with sandals from June to September, over a roll neck with boots from October on. On a cost-per-wear basis it has lapped everything else I own, and I am a woman who counts.

Three. The cut is honest. It falls straight, no waist to sit wrong over a layer, and it runs from a UK 8 to a 24 in the same shape the whole way. Green or blue. The green is the one that gets the comments in November.

About the price

I am careful with money and I will not pretend otherwise, so let us do the arithmetic properly.

The Sara is £34.95. It was £70.00.

But the real sum is this. A dress you wear for four months costs whatever it costs. A dress you wear for ten months costs a third of that in practice, and this is now a ten-month dress. My funeral coat cannot say the same.

They are a small boutique selling directly, no department store taking a slice in the middle, which is how the price stays where it is.

I do not trust perfect scores, so I read the reviews before I first ordered. Just over three hundred of them at 4.2 stars, which sounded like real people, so I read on. One woman had written, “Wore it all summer and now over a polo neck with boots. Two outfits from one dress. Wish I had bought the blue as well.” That settled it, and I have since fixed the blue part myself.

If you were stood at my kitchen table

I would put the kettle on and say this.

Before you pack the summer box this year, take the sleeveless dresses back out. Every one of them is a pinafore that nobody told you about, and you already own the roll neck. The whole trick costs nothing if you have the dress, and £34.95 if you do not.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the boutique very nearly packed this away for the year with the rest of the warm-weather stock. The middle sizes are already going, and once this batch has gone it has gone until spring.

The box on the wardrobe is half empty this year, and so much the better.

Pat