A letter from a reader

At 63, I went looking for one dress without a flower on it

I have never written anything like this before, and I want to say at the start that I am not a writer and I am not in the habit of telling other women what to wear.

But three different women asked me about a dress at our neighborhood potluck, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started in a department store in the spring. I walked the whole dress floor, rack by rack, on a simple errand. I wanted one plain dress. No print, no pattern, just a good dress in a good color.

Every single dress for a woman my age had a flower on it.

Florals, ditsy florals, tropical florals, watercolor florals. I like a floral fine. I own plenty. But some days you want to look composed rather than in bloom, and apparently somebody decided women over sixty are not allowed that option. I went home with nothing.

I did not imagine this. That is the part I want to be clear about. Go and look at what is sold to us. The plain dresses live in the young departments, cut for twenty-five-year-olds, and our departments get the garden.

How it happens

Somewhere along the way the stores decided that past a certain age, a woman's clothes should do the talking for her, loudly, in petals.

A plain dress asks more of the cut. It has nowhere to hide. So it is easier to print flowers on a mediocre dress than to make a good plain one, and that is exactly what the racks are full of.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the floral because it is fine. Everyone at the party is wearing a version of it, which is rather the point.

What I had wrong

I had assumed plain meant boring. That without a print, a dress needed jewelry and effort and somewhere to be.

It turns out that is backwards.

A plain dress with one good idea on it reads as more considered than any print. It is the difference between a wall of wallpaper and a wall with one good painting. The eye goes to the idea, and the woman wearing it looks like she chose it on purpose. Which I did.

The dress is called the Séraphine

It is from Iris & Nora, a little boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

The dress is called the Séraphine. Sleeveless, in a deep army green, with a crew neck and the one good idea, three brass buttons running down one side of the front, slightly off center, with a seam that follows them all the way down. That is the whole design, and it is plenty.

It swings from the shoulder in one clean line, no waistband, no cinching, so it skims everything on the way down and clings nowhere. The hem lands right at the knee, which covers what I want covered and works with sandals or sneakers both. And the green goes with everything I own, which after years of prints that matched nothing felt like a small miracle.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is a plain dress somebody finally took seriously.

What happened at the potluck

I wore it for the first time to the neighborhood potluck, with flat sandals and my good earrings.

Three women asked me about it before the dessert table opened. One of them was Glenda, who has lived on our street for eighteen years and has never once commented on anything I have worn.

She told me I looked like the one who had organized the whole thing. I had brought a bag of ice. I have decided to take it as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments was that I forgot about it. No print to coordinate, no waistband to mind, nothing riding up. I carried folding chairs, I sat on a low wall, I went back for seconds, and I did not think about what I had on once.

The next morning I put it right back on to water the yard, and felt completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. The buttons do all the work. Three brass buttons, set off center. People read it as design, because it is. It is the reason a plain dress gets compliments that my prints never did.

Two. Plain multiplies your closet. Every scarf, cardigan and pair of earrings I own suddenly works with it. A print negotiates with your wardrobe. A plain dress cooperates.

Three. The cut is honest. It runs from an S to a 2XL in the same easy swing shape the whole way, and it comes in the green, a red, a black and a navy. I started with the green because it is the color of October, and I am going back for the black.

About the price

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

The Séraphine is $44.95. It was $90.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because a well-cut plain dress is exactly the thing department stores charge double for when they bother to make one at all.

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 their sale to move each season's stock along.

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, “Finally a dress that is not a print. The buttons make it. I get asked about it every time.” That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on the porch with iced tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have walked a dress floor wanting one plain dress and gone home with nothing, or worse, with another floral you did not really want, it was never your taste that was the problem. It was the racks. The plain dress exists. It just is not in the department store.

Not because a dress will change your life. It will not. But there is something in looking in the mirror and seeing composed 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 right now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. Four colors, S to 2XL, and once this stock is gone, it is gone.

Composed, it turns out, was three brass buttons away.

Peggy