A letter from a reader

At 63, I had been buying my dresses one size up for fifteen years

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 a birthday lunch on Saturday, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

First, a confession. For about fifteen years, every dress I bought was one size up. Not because the bigger size fit. Because the bigger size did not touch my middle, and somewhere along the line that had become the only thing I asked of a dress.

Fitted and miserable, or comfortable and invisible. Those seemed to be the two choices.

And I chose invisible so many times in a row that it stopped feeling like a choice at all.

How the sizing up starts

Nobody decides to do it. It happens one dress at a time.

A waistband digs at a dinner and you quietly go up a size on the next one. A fitted dress rides up at a wedding and the one after that is looser. Each dress is only a little bigger than the last, and then one day you catch yourself in a shop window wearing what is essentially a very polite tent, and you cannot remember voting for any of it.

The shops do not help, because they cut for two women only. The one who wants everything close to the body, and the one they have decided has stopped caring. There did not seem to be anything for a woman who wants to breathe AND look like she made an effort.

Then Diane stepped out of her front door

My neighbor Diane came out of her house in June wearing navy with big soft pink polka dots, a hem that swung when she walked, and a little fabric rose at the shoulder, and I stood there with the hose running over my flowerbed.

She did not look squeezed into anything. She also did not look like she was hiding. She looked finished, like a woman on her way somewhere pleasant, and when I asked, she said it was called the Beatrice, from Iris & Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

I will be honest about my first thought when I looked it up. A straight dress with no waist. That is exactly what I had been hiding in for fifteen years, and I nearly closed the page.

But here is the difference, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. My size-up dresses were fitted dresses pretending to be comfortable, so they just looked wrong. The Beatrice is cut straight on purpose. It skims instead of clings, and then the pleated hem and the sheer ruffle cuffs do all the moving, so the dress reads as dressy and deliberate rather than roomy. The dots and the rosette say somebody designed this, not somebody gave up.

And it pulls straight on over your head. No zips, no buttons, no asking anybody to help with anything.

What happened at the lunch

I wore it to a birthday lunch on Saturday, my actual size, first time in fifteen years.

Three different women asked me where it was from before the cake came out. And my friend Sue told me I looked like I had made a proper effort, which I found very funny, because it had taken me the length of one radio song to get dressed.

The part I keep coming back to is that I did not think about my middle once. Not sitting down, not standing up for photographs, not reaching across the table. The dress moved and I just sat there eating cake like a person.

It has been out four times in two weeks since, to the market, to dinner, on the porch of an evening, and it comes off the hanger looking exactly as it went on. The pleats keep themselves.

Three things I have learned since

One. Skimming and hiding are not the same thing. A dress cut straight on purpose looks deliberate. A fitted dress bought big looks like an apology. I spent fifteen years not knowing the difference.

Two. The hem does the work. The pleated flounce moves when you walk, so the dress looks alive even though it never touches your middle. People see movement and read it as style.

Three. The sizing is honest. Small to 5XL, the same easy shape the whole way up, in the pink dots or the white. Order your actual size. That is the whole point of it.

About the price

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

The Beatrice is $44.95. It was $90.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because a dress with a pleated hem and a rosette and ruffle cuffs is usually priced like the ruffles are gold plated.

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 a summer sale to move the season’s stock.

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, “I wore it to my grandson’s christening and four people asked me where it was from, and it is the most comfortable thing I own.” 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 an iced tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

Go and look at the labels in your own closet. If the sizes have been quietly creeping up while you stayed the same, you have been choosing invisible like I was, and the fix is not a smaller dress and a miserable afternoon. It is a dress that was designed from the start to never touch your middle, and to look lovely doing it.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

I bought my size. First time in fifteen years.

Peggy