A letter from a reader

At 64, I found the one dress I reach for every single morning without thinking

I have never written one of these before, and I should 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 four different women stopped me about this dress at the farmers market on Saturday morning, and I have explained it so many times since that writing it down properly felt easier than saying it again.

It started without me noticing. One morning a few weeks ago I went to get dressed and reached, without a single thought, for the same dress I had worn the day before, and the day before that. I stood there for a moment and realised I had not worn anything else in nearly a week.

And I did not mind one bit, which is the strange part. I have a closet full of perfectly good things and I walk straight past all of them for this one dress, every morning, without thinking about it at all.

Why I stopped reaching for anything else

It goes over my head and I am dressed. There is no zip to wrestle, no waistband deciding whether it approves of me that day, nothing to tuck or smooth or keep checking in the mirror. I put it on and I get on with the morning.

It is cut loose, so nothing pinches and nothing clings. But here is the part I had not expected. It does not hang off me like a sack either. It drapes. It follows me instead of swallowing me, so I look like I thought about what I was wearing even on the mornings I plainly did not.

And it is comfortable in the way you forget clothes are allowed to be. Light, cool, easy. I put it on for a five minute errand and I am still in it at supper, because it simply never occurs to me to take it off.

The part about my arms

I should be honest about the thing that nearly stopped me ordering it, because I suspect it is the same thing stopping you.

It is sleeveless. And for about ten years I had it settled in my mind that my arms had disqualified me from sleeveless anything. Every summer I put them away under a cardigan I did not want to be wearing in August.

What I had wrong is that it was never my arms. It was the cut. Everything sleeveless I had tried was made for a woman of thirty, cut high and tight under the arm and clinging everywhere it touched, and I came out of those fitting rooms deciding there was something wrong with me. There was nothing wrong with me. Nobody was making them for a woman of sixty-four and expecting her to feel good in one.

This one is cut differently. The armhole is wide and soft, so nothing digs in and nothing is on show that I did not choose to show. It is loose through the body, so it skims rather than clings. And the print does the work, big hand-drawn black lines on a crisp white, so what people look at is the dress.

I have not reached for the cardigan once.

The pockets I did not expect to love

I feel a little silly admitting how much this matters, but it has real pockets. Deep ones. The proper kind that hold my phone and my reading glasses and, if I am honest, the odd dog biscuit, without anything tipping out when I sit down.

I had not realised how much I had missed them. For years I carried a little bag from room to room just to have somewhere to put my glasses. Now they go in a pocket and I forget about them. It is a small thing, and it has quietly changed the shape of my whole day.

The dress is called the Amara

It is from Parker & Bennett, a small New York house that has been quietly dressing women our age for twenty-seven years.

The dress is called the Amara. A sleeveless midi in a crisp white, marked all over with hand-drawn black lines in shifting blocks, gathered at the waist into an easy skirt that falls to mid-calf. It goes over flats or sandals and it has those deep pockets set into the sides.

I will be honest about one thing, because I would want somebody to tell me. It is a light, crisp weave, so if you sit in the car for two hours it creases a little. It shakes out. I decided I did not mind, and I am fussy.

What happened at the farmers market

I wore it to do nothing more exciting than buy tomatoes.

Four women stopped me between the stalls to ask where it was from. Four. And then Diane, who I have known since our children were in grade school, called that evening to ask the same thing, because one of them had told her about it.

I have never had a conversation about my clothes while buying tomatoes before.

What stayed with me, though, was not the asking. It was that I had stopped thinking about what I had on entirely. I was not tugging at anything, or wondering whether it had ridden up, or whether it suited me. I bought my tomatoes and I had a chat and it did not cross my mind once.

The next morning I reached for it again. Of course I did.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from a small right up to a 5XL, and it is the same easy 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 pockets change how you carry a day. I no longer pick up a little bag just to move around the house. My glasses, my phone, the things I reach for a hundred times a day, they are simply on me.

Three. It goes both ways. Exactly as it is for the market and the yard, or with a necklace and better shoes for a lunch, and nobody would guess it was the same dress I do the shopping in.

About the price

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

The Amara is $70.95. It was $176.95.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because you can walk into any mall and pay a good deal more for a dress that will have lost its shape by September.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small house selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle. And they are in the middle of a move. After twenty-seven years in the same New York building, the daughter is expecting her first baby and the family is going closer to home, so the current stock is not making the trip with them. That is the whole of it. It is rather a lovely reason for a sale, when you think about it.

Then I ordered a second one, so I would not be caught out on wash day.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the yard with a cup of coffee and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have been wanting one easy dress you can throw on in the morning and simply forget about all day, one that is comfortable without looking like you have given up, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and have a look.

Not because a dress will change your life. It will not. But there is something in getting dressed without it being a decision at all, and going a whole day without once thinking about what you have on, that I had rather forgotten was possible.

Two practical things. They are shipping the stock as it goes, and once a piece has sold that is it, there is no more of it coming. And the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because the size I went back for had already gone.

I have not planned an outfit since it arrived. I just reach for the same one, and I am glad every single time.

Susan

Moving sale on now. Middle sizes go first.

Susan Hayes is 64 and lives in Connecticut with a labrador and a husband who has learned not to comment on new dresses. She is not a fashion writer.