A letter from a reader

At 67, I owned smart clothes and comfortable clothes and nothing that was both

Telling other women what they ought to wear is not something I have ever done, and writing things for strangers to read is even further from my line. I am not a writer. Nothing like this has ever left my kitchen table before, so you will have to bear with me.

But three different women asked me about a cardigan at the butcher’s on Saturday morning, and I have now explained it enough times over the counter that it seemed simpler to write the whole thing down properly.

It started at my sister June’s back door last month. I had only called round to drop off a dish. She answered the door looking, I thought, rather smart, in something navy with a collar and a row of buttons, and my first words were to ask whether she was off out somewhere and should I come back another time. June looked down at herself and then at me with great patience.

I am not dressed up, Maggie. This is a cardigan.

I thought about that all the way home, and that evening I stood in front of my own wardrobe and saw it plainly for the first time. Everything in there belonged to one of two piles. The smart things, which I wore to look right and could not wait to get home and take off. And the comfortable things, which I actually liked wearing and would not have answered the door in. Two wardrobes, and after forty years of buying clothes, not one single thing that was both.

How it happens

Nobody decides to live like that. It happens quietly.

The shops decided it for us a long time ago. Anything smart is built stiff, with shoulders that need standing up straight in and waists that punish you for sitting down. Anything comfortable is made shapeless, in the sad colours of porridge, as if being at ease were something to apologise for. Rail after rail, one or the other, never both.

So you learn to run two wardrobes. One for the door and one for yourself. You change before you go out and you change the moment you get home, and if the doorbell goes on a Sunday afternoon you glance down at yourself and decide whether you are fit to answer it. I did that for years without once thinking it was strange.

What I had wrong

I always assumed that looking put together had to cost you something. That the smartness lived in the stiffness, in the pressing and the tailoring and the sucking in, and that anything soft would always read as giving up.

June’s cardigan took that apart on her doorstep. Because what actually makes a thing look smart is a handful of small signals. A proper collar. Buttons that look chosen. A hem with some shape to it. And here is the part it took me until 67 to work out. None of those signals weighs anything. There is no law that says a collar must come with discomfort attached. Somebody just has to think to put one on a cardigan, and apparently somebody finally has.

The cardigan is called the Katrien

It is from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. June had found them before I did, which she enjoys enormously.

It is a deep navy cardigan in a proper ribbed knit, with a pointed collar that sits flat the way a jacket collar does, and a single row of big polished gold toned buttons down the front. Round discs, about the size of the biscuits I am not supposed to eat, and they catch the light in a way that looks entirely deliberate. The sleeves are generous and gather into neat ribbed cuffs, and the hem curves in a soft wave instead of being cut straight across. They do it in a wine and a gold as well.

And the whole trick of it is this. Every part your eye lands on says smart little jacket. The collar, the buttons, that curved hem. But every part you actually feel says cardigan. It is soft and roomy and asks nothing of you, it goes over jeans or a dress or my good trousers without a moment of thought, and there is nothing to press, hold in or endure. From across a room you look like a woman with somewhere to be. From inside it, you are as comfortable as you would be in the oldest thing you own.

What happened at the butcher’s

I wore it into the village on Saturday morning with my jeans, to the butcher’s, in the queue for the good sausages. I had made no effort whatsoever. That is rather the point of it.

Three women asked me about it before I reached the counter. The lady in front of me turned round and asked whether I was off somewhere nice afterwards, and seemed genuinely surprised when I said only home to walk the dog. The woman behind me touched the sleeve, asked where it was from, and wanted to know whether it was as soft as it looked. And the girl on the till said she had been admiring the buttons since I came through the door.

I have been going to that butcher for more years than I will admit to, and in all that time nobody has once remarked on anything I was wearing. I walked home with the sausages feeling quietly delighted with myself, and the labrador, who has never remarked on anything I wear either, got an extra long walk out of it.

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, generous shape the whole way up, not a different garment once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. It has quietly replaced my jacket. The navy goes over everything I own, and because the collar and buttons do the work, whatever is underneath stops mattering. I have worn it over a plain white top more times than I can count and been treated like a woman who had planned her outfit.

Three. Comfortable does not have to look like giving up. I spent forty years believing it did. It took a cardigan with a collar to prove me wrong, and I find I do not mind being wrong in the slightest.

About the price

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

The Katrien is £42.95. It was £86.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because a jacket that looked this deliberate would cost you a good deal more on the high street, and it would not be half as pleasant to sit down in. 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, “It is the only thing I own that looks smart and feels like a cardigan. I have worn it four days out of seven and had compliments on three of them.” That was the one that decided it for me.

June is getting the wine one for Christmas, although she maintains the whole thing was her idea in the first place, and I suppose she is right.

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.

Go and stand in front of your wardrobe and count how many things in there you would happily both answer the door in and spend a whole Sunday in. If the answer is plenty, wonderful, you need nothing from me. But if you find, as I did, that everything belongs to one pile or the other, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to look at this cardigan. Not because a cardigan will change your life. It will not. But June was right on her doorstep. Nobody ever said looking put together had to be uncomfortable, and it turns out it does not.

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 you dither over the colours, the navy goes with everything you already own. That is the one I would start with.

I have stopped keeping one wardrobe for the door and another for myself.

Maggie