A letter from a reader

At 63, everything comfortable I owned was something I would not answer the door in

Before I go any further I should say that I have never written a piece like this in my life. I am not a writer, and I am not a woman who goes around telling other women what they should wear.

But three different women asked me about a set of clothes at the eye doctor’s on Thursday morning, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started with my daughter, who has a key and no habit of calling first. Last month she let herself in while I was upstairs, and I did what I have done for years whenever the doorbell goes. I looked down at what I had on, and I went to change before I came down.

It took you ten minutes to come downstairs, and you have changed your pants.

She was right, and it was worse than she knew. I had two closets without ever deciding to. The comfortable things, the pilled sweatpants and the old fleece with paint on the cuff, that I lived in and would not be seen in. And the decent things, that came off the minute I got home, like a uniform at the end of a shift. Not one single thing in the house was both.

How it happens

Nobody decides to have house clothes. It happens quietly.

A sweater pills, and instead of leaving, it gets demoted. Some sweatpants arrive one Christmas for around the house, and around the house is where they stay. And the stores do not help, because for women our age they stock two kinds of clothes. The proper ones, that need thinking about and holding in and managing all day. And the giving-up ones, gray marl and elastic and nothing else, that are comfortable precisely because nobody expected you to be seen in them.

So the comfortable clothes become a secret. You wear them most of your life and show them to nobody, and you plan your whole day around who might catch you in them. When you say it out loud it sounds crazy. I planned my afternoons around a doorbell.

What I had wrong

I assumed that was simply what comfort looked like. If it felt like a hug it would look like a sack, and the best I could do was keep the sack indoors.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to see the flaw in that. The problem was never that comfortable clothes exist. It is that nothing comfortable I owned had been designed to be looked at. No two pieces of it belonged to each other. Of course it read as giving up. It was odds and ends, worn in private, and it looked exactly like what it was.

The set is called the Lily

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.

It is a two piece set. A relaxed sweatshirt and wide leg pants, both cut from the same soft plaid, big gentle blocks of deep red and gray that blur into each other rather than sharp lines. And along the seams, around the neck, down the sleeves and the legs, there is a fine white line of piping, which sounds like nothing and is the whole trick. It is the difference between fabric that happens to be on you and an outfit that has been finished.

The rest is quietly right. The waistband is soft and does not dig, even sitting down, even after a big lunch. The pockets are real pockets, and the big ones on the front of the legs take a phone and keys and dog treats with room to spare. It is warm without being heavy, and on the mornings a cool front has come through it goes under a jacket without bunching up.

What happened at the eye doctor’s

I had my eye exam on Thursday morning, and I wore it out of the house without thinking twice, which at the time did not strike me as remarkable.

Three women asked me about it before I had even chosen frames. The lady sitting next to me in the waiting room wanted to know if it was as warm as it looked. Another caught me at the little mirror and asked whether the top and pants had come together or whether I had matched them myself, and seemed genuinely pleased when I said together. And the woman doing my frames fitting held up the mirror and said the new glasses had a lot to live up to.

The next morning I put it straight back on to walk my daughter’s labrador around the neighborhood. And when the delivery driver knocked with a package, I answered the door on the first knock, in the clothes I had been comfortable in all morning, which sounds like nothing and is not.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from an XS to a 2XL, and it is the same relaxed shape the whole way through, not a different outfit once you pass a certain letter. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. The pockets earn their keep. Phone, keys, treats, a tissue, and both hands still free for the leash. The big front ones close with a flap, so nothing has fallen out on a walk yet, and I have given it every chance.

Three. Nobody can tell it is the comfortable option. Because the two pieces match, it reads as an outfit somebody chose. Only I know it feels like the things I used to hide in. That gap, between how it feels and how it reads, is the whole reason I am writing this.

About the price

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

The Lily is $69.95 at the moment. It was $140.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because that is two pieces for less than I have paid for one sweater that pilled by Christmas. 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 cooler 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, “Wore it to my daughter’s for the whole weekend and lived in it. It washes well and it does not look like loungewear.” That was the one that decided it for me.

I have not bought sweatpants since, which my daughter finds funnier than I do.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting with a pot of coffee and you asked me, this is what I would say.

Think about what you have on right now, reading this at home. If it is something you would quietly not answer the door in, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at this set. Not because an outfit will change your life. It will not. But there is something in being comfortable and fit to be seen at the same time, in your own kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday, that I had stopped believing was available to me.

Two practical things. Shipping is free, and the boutique told me plainly that once this stock is gone, it is gone, so the middle sizes will disappear first. And it is a set, so there is nothing to get right. It comes out of the bag already going together.

These days I answer the door on the first knock.

Peggy