A Letter From a Reader

At 55, I Spend My Days Telling Other People What Looks Good. There Was Nothing In My Own Closet I Felt Good In.

A note from an interior designer in Outremont who had quietly stopped shopping for herself, and the small thing that changed her mind.

I wrote this first in French, which is my language, and then again in English, because my daughter said more women would read it that way. Émilie is twenty eight and works in communications in Toronto, so I have learned to do as I am told.

I have never written anything like this before, and I very nearly did not, because there is something a little humiliating in it.

I am an interior designer. I have spent twenty two years walking into other people's homes and telling them, with complete confidence, that the grey is wrong for the light in that room and that the green will change everything. People pay me for that. They write it down.

And then in June, over lunch, my friend Sophie asked me kindly why I was wearing the same black top to every single client I have. And I did not have an answer for her.

I went home to Outremont and I counted. Three blacks. Two navies. One grey cardigan I have owned since Julien was in high school, and Julien is twenty five.

How it happens

I did not decide to dress like that. Nobody decides that.

It happens one sensible purchase at a time. You buy the black one because it is safe, and because it goes with everything, and because nobody will look twice at it. Somewhere along the way that stopped being a compromise and quietly became the point.

There was also, if I am honest about it, a divorce in there. Four years ago now, and I am perfectly happy, I want to be clear about that. But you do not notice at first that you have stopped dressing for anybody, including yourself. You notice it much later, in a photograph, or when a good friend asks you a gentle question over a bowl of soup.

And it is not entirely our own doing either. Look at who these companies photograph. Every email in my inbox, every advertisement on my telephone, a girl of twenty four in something I would not have worn at twenty four. Nothing in any of it says: we thought about a woman of fifty five, with a real body and a full week, who still cares very much what she looks like.

So you stop expecting anything, and you buy the black one again.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong, and it is embarrassing given what I do for a living.

I had decided that the problem was me. My arms, my middle, the fact that I do not look the way I looked at forty. So I dressed to hide, in dark colours and shapeless cuts, and I told myself I was being sensible about it.

It was never that.

I choose colour for a living. I know that the same wall reads completely differently in the light coming off the river and in the light coming off a brick street. I know that a warm green makes a room feel alive, and that a cold grey makes it feel like a waiting room. And it had genuinely never occurred to me to apply a single word of that to a face.

Black next to a face of fifty five does exactly what a cold grey does to a room that faces north. It takes the warmth out and it leaves the shadows in.

That is not vanity. It is light. I have been charging people for that advice for two decades and I had never once thought to give it to myself.

When I explained all of this to Julien, who is a graphic designer and therefore believes he invented colour, he laughed at me for a full minute. Maman, he said. You of all people.

Then Sophie turned up in a green one

Sophie and I have known one another since our children were small, and she is the person I telephone before I buy anything expensive, because she is the only one who will say no to me.

We had lunch again a few weeks later and she came in wearing this deep green top, and I could not stop looking at it. Not at her. At the colour. It was doing precisely the thing I have just spent three paragraphs explaining.

She told me it was called the Zamma, from EmmaVancouver, a Canadian shop out west, and that she had ordered it on her telephone in about four minutes while waiting for a client.

A soft V neck with a small button detail at the front, sleeves that sit properly on a real arm, and a body cut loosely enough that it falls away from you instead of sitting on you.

I ordered the green that evening. One. I want to be honest that I ordered exactly one, because I am the sort of woman who would rather own four things she loves than twelve she tolerates, and because I did not believe in it yet.

See the Zamma

What happened at the vernissage

I wore it first to a site visit, which was cowardly of me, and then on the Friday to a small gallery opening on Saint Laurent with Sophie.

Three women asked me where the top was from before we had reached the second room. One of them was a woman I have worked alongside for nine years and who has never once said a single word about anything I have worn.

But the compliments are not the part that stayed with me.

The part that stayed with me is that I did not think about it. Not once, all evening. I did not adjust anything, or fold my arms across my middle, or catch sight of myself in the glass of a frame and wish I had worn something else. I stood there and looked at the paintings, which is what I had gone there to do.

Three things I have learned since

One. The cut is doing the work. It is loose through the shoulder and through the waist, so that it falls away from the body rather than following it. There is a real difference between a top that skims you and a top that is simply too big, and this is the first kind. It reads as deliberate, which is the entire game.

Two. The V and that small button detail are the trick. One quiet thing at the front is the reason it reads as an outfit rather than as a top. I put it on with trousers I have owned for years and I looked as though I had planned something. I had planned nothing. I had done my yoga and made a coffee.

Three. The colour is not decoration. It is the reason it works. I have since bought the navy as well, which is lovely, but the green is the one strangers stop me over, and it is the one that makes me look as though I slept well. There are six of them. If you take one piece of professional advice from me, let it be this. Skip the black. You already own the black. The black is the problem.

About the price

I want to be straightforward here, because the price is what made me suspicious rather than what tempted me.

The Zamma is $59.95. It was $148.95.

I do not usually trust that. I would far rather pay properly for one good piece, and a large number sitting beside a small number very often means the large number was never real. That is precisely why I ordered only the one.

What I found, when I went and looked, was a Canadian shop selling directly, running a sale at the end of the summer to move the season through before the autumn pieces land. There is no department store in the middle taking its cut. It is not a complicated explanation, and it is the same one I would give a client about a showroom clearing its floor.

Then I did what I always do, which is read the bad reviews before the good ones.

There are thirty five reviews sitting at two stars and I read every one of them. They say two things. Somebody ordered a size down out of habit, or somebody was surprised by how low the V sits. Neither of those is a fault in the top. That told me a great deal more than the compliments did, and it told me exactly what to do, which was to take my size from the chart and to keep a camisole in the drawer.

The measurements are printed on the page in inches, bust and sleeve and length, size by size. That is the one thing I want from a website and almost never get. I took my size from the chart instead of from habit, and it was right the first time.

See if your size is still in stock

What I would tell you if we were sitting together

If you and I were on a terrasse with a coffee, and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If your closet has quietly become three blacks and two navies, and you have begun telling yourself that this is simply what suits you now, then it is worth ten minutes of an evening to go and look.

Not because a top changes anything. It does not. I have the same knees, the same kitchen and the same Thursday that I had in May. But there is something in getting dressed in the morning and recognizing the woman in the mirror rather than merely approving of her, and I had stopped expecting it. I would rather you did not stop expecting it either.

Two practical things, because I would like to be useful. It runs from a small right through to a 5XL, and the middle sizes go first, which I discovered when I went back for the navy. And the sale is on because the season is turning, so it will not sit there waiting for you.

I am cooking for eight on Saturday, in a kitchen built for two, and I already know what I am going to wear.

I have not worn the black top since June.

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, does her yoga most mornings, cooks for a great many more people than her kitchen was built for, skis badly in the winter, and listens to a considerable amount of jazz. She is not a fashion writer.

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