A letter from a reader

At 63, I realized every jacket I owned was the color of a rainy sidewalk

I am going to keep this short, because if there is one thing I know about myself, it is that I am no writer. Sixty-three years and I have never once put words down for strangers to read, and I have never believed it was my business to tell another woman what she ought to wear.

But three different women asked me about an overshirt in the quilt shop on Thursday morning, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to sit down and write it out properly.

It started at the end of August. My sister Sue came over for lunch, and while she was hanging her things up she stood for a moment at the row of hooks by my back door. Gray windbreaker. Navy fleece. A black quilted thing I have had since my daughter was in high school. She looked at the lot of them, and then she looked at me.

Peggy, you have started dressing like the weather.

I laughed, because that is what you do. And then I went and stood in front of my own closet after she had gone, and she was right. Slate, stone, navy, black. Not one single thing hanging there with any life in it at all.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to be gray. It happens quietly, one sensible purchase at a time, until your own sister says it out loud at your back door.

How it happens

I used to wear prints. In my forties I had a spotted blouse I wore so often the cuffs went, and I never once felt silly in it.

What changed was not me. It was the stores.

Somewhere along the way the stores decided that pattern is for the young, and that women our age would like to be handed the same rack of slate and stone and navy every fall, all of it described as versatile or classic, which we both know is a polite way of saying nobody thought about you very hard.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the gray one because it goes with everything, which is true, in the way that fog goes with everything. You wear it. Nobody says a word, which is sort of the point.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I had wrong, and I suspect I am not the only one.

I had decided that a real print at my age would look like I was asking for attention. Every time I saw dots or flowers on a rack I thought, pretty, for somebody else, and moved along to the navy.

It turns out the problem was never the pattern.

It is the shape it sits on. A busy little print on a fussy, clingy cut does look like hard work. But a big, confident print on an easy, relaxed shape reads completely differently. It reads as a decision. It looks like style rather than costume, and it took my sister and a row of gray coat hooks to make me go and find that out.

The overshirt is called the Portia

It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now.

The overshirt is called the Portia. A relaxed shirt jacket in a soft washed blue, scattered with big black polka dots, with a button front and a collar that sits up nicely at the neck. It comes in a black with white dots as well, and a tan and a burgundy, which I will come back to.

The cut is the clever part. It is roomy through the body without being shapeless, the sleeves are generous and roll back easily, and the back sits a little longer than the front, so when you bend to the washing machine or reach up to a shelf you are covered and you know it. It is made from a premium material with a soft, washed feel that gets comfortabler the more you wear it, if that is a word, which Sue assures me it is not.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is a shirt jacket somebody actually thought about.

What happened at the quilt shop

I wore it into town on Thursday to pick up batting for a quilt I have been meaning to finish, over a white top and my navy slacks, which two weeks ago would have been the whole outfit.

Three women asked me about it. Three. The lady at the fabric shelves said her daughter had been trying to get her into something like it for a year. A younger woman asked if they did it in other colors. And Lorene, who has run the quilt shop for twenty years and has never once commented on anything I have worn, looked over her glasses and told me the dots were very me.

I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I forgot I had it on. I did not spend the morning tugging at anything or wondering whether it was too much. I paid for my batting, I had my coffee, and I did not think about what I was wearing once.

The next morning I put it straight back on to walk my daughter's labrador, who I had for the morning, over an old sweater, and felt completely myself. That is the rarest sort of thing. The one you can wear into town and feel a little bit dressed up in, then throw on with a borrowed labrador pulling at the leash, and feel right either way.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from a size S all the way to a 3XL, and it is the same relaxed cut the whole way up, not a different shape once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. The longer back earns its keep. You do not think about it until you bend down to the dishwasher or reach the top shelf, and then you realize you have stopped doing that little tug at the hem you did not know you did. It is a small thing and it changes the whole day.

Three. It goes both ways. Buttoned up with good earrings it will do for a coffee out. Open over a plain top and slacks it is an everyday jacket. And it is the dots doing the work either way, so you never feel you have to try.

About the price

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

The Portia is $51.95. It was $104.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because you can walk into any department store and pay more than that for a plain gray jacket that will do absolutely nothing for you.

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 have a sale on at the moment as the first fall stock comes in.

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 more, not less. Real women, mixed opinions, mostly very good. One woman in Gonzales had written, “I bought the blue for everyday and my daughter keeps trying to borrow it. It goes over everything I own.”

Then I put the burgundy in my cart as well.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting at my kitchen table with the coffee going and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have spent the last few falls reaching for the same gray jacket, not because you like it but because nothing with any life in it ever seemed meant for you, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at this one.

Not because an overshirt will change your life. It will not. But there is something in catching sight of yourself in a store window and thinking, oh, there I am, that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because Sue went to order her own and had to wait on the size she wanted. And the first fall stock is already going, so I would not leave it until the cold weather really arrives.

I have not reached for the gray jacket since.

Peggy