A Letter From a Reader

At 55 I Was Cold in Other People's Houses, and Every Fix I Found Made Me Look Ten Years Older

There has been a cardigan in the boot of my car for six years and I have never let a client see me arrive in it.

That is the confession, and I would like it out early.

I have written here three times and you have written back every time. After the last letter a surprising number of you added one line about being cold, as though it were an embarrassing thing to mind.

My work is standing in other people's rooms, and in August half of them are half renovated. No heat, plaster dust, a window out. I am the woman being paid to have an opinion about the colour of a room she cannot feel her hands in.

I was cold, and everything that fixed it aged me.

There is no shortage of warm things. There is a shortage of warm things that do not make a woman of fifty five look like she has stopped trying. Mine was warm. It was also shapeless, and I wore it anyway.

I did not choose that

Nobody decides to keep an ugly cardigan in the car. You are cold once, you buy something soft because soft sounds like the answer, and you keep it. Then you notice you only wear it where nobody can see you, and you leave it at that for six years.

What I had wrong

I thought shapeless was the price of soft. Soft knit, soft shape, nothing to be done. I had put it down to the fabric. It is not the fabric. It is the edges.

I have spent twenty two years telling clients that the difference between a finished room and an unfinished one is almost never the furniture. It is the trim. The skirting, the architrave, the reveal around a window. A room with no trim does not read as minimal. It reads as unfinished.

A soft thing with no edges does not read as relaxed.

Go and look at the cardigan you have given up on. The front just stops, the sleeve just stops, the hem follows nothing.

This one is ribbed in four places: the collar, both cuffs, the hem, and a narrow rib down each front edge. That rib is a trim. It holds a line where the garment ends, and the soft part can be soft in between.

See The Annika Cardigan

What happened on the Plateau

I did not find it. A client did. She is in her sixties, we were standing in her unheated kitchen arguing pleasantly about a splashback, and she was wearing it. I asked what it was before I asked anything else, which is not like me in a client's house.

It is called the Annika and it comes from EmmaVancouver, a small Canadian shop out west that sells directly rather than through the department stores. That mattered more to me than it will to you.

Three things I have learned since

One. The pockets are set low, and that is not a detail. They sit exactly where your hands fall with your arms down, not up at the waist where a pocket is decorative. I had not understood how much of being cold is simply your hands, or how much of looking uncomfortable is having nowhere to put them.

Two. It has weight. Not heavy, but enough that it hangs instead of clinging, and that is the difference between a knit that looks bought and one that looks kept. A very light cardigan follows every lump underneath it. This one falls past all of that and stops at the hip.

Three. There is nothing to fasten. No buttons, no zip, nothing to pull across the middle. It goes over a blouse, over a dress, over the top I am already wearing, and the two front edges just hang. It has become the thing by the door.

About the price

The Annika is $79.95. It was $159.95. That is exactly half, and a number landing that neatly is usually the tell that the first one was never real.

So I looked, because I always do. A Canadian shop selling directly, no department store in the middle taking its half, clearing the light knits before the winter weights land in September. I would give a client the same explanation about a showroom clearing its floor.

And the honest thing nobody selling you a cardigan will say: it is an open front, so it is not a coat and it will not keep wind out. It is for indoors, for the shoulder season and for cold rooms. That is exactly what I needed, and you should know it before you order.

See The Annika Cardigan

What I would tell you if we were sitting together

If there is something warm in your house that you only wear where nobody can see you, the problem was never that you are cold, and it was never your shape. The thing has no edges, and you have been blaming yourself for what a hem was supposed to do.

Not because a cardigan changes anything. It does not. I have the same cold clients and the same August and the same hands. But there is a difference between putting something on and hoping nobody looks, and putting it on and forgetting about it, and I had stopped expecting the second one.

It runs from a small through to a 3XL, and the middle sizes go first, which I learned when I went back for a second colour and had to wait. The sale is on because the season is turning.

The one in the car went into the donation bag on Sunday. Six years, and it took me eleven minutes.

Claire

About the writer. Claire Beaulieu is 55 and lives in Outremont, Montreal, where she works as an independent interior design consultant. She has two grown children, walks the mountain on Sunday mornings, cooks for a great many more people than her kitchen was built for, and listens to a considerable amount of jazz. She writes here about what she is actually wearing, which is not something she expected to be doing at fifty five.

This page is an advertisement for EmmaVancouver.