A Letter From a Reader

At 55, I Told My Daughter I Was Far Too Old For a Jumpsuit. I Have Worn Almost Nothing Else Since July.

A note from an interior designer in Outremont who talks about line and proportion for a living, and had never once thought to point any of it at herself.

Some of you read the letter I wrote here at the beginning of August, about a closet that had quietly become three blacks and two navies. A surprising number of you wrote back. Several of you asked me the same question, and it was not about colour at all. It was about the mornings. So here is the second thing, and it is the one I argued with for longest.

I said no to this for eleven days, and I would like that on the record before I say anything else.

I am an interior designer. I have spent twenty two years standing in other people's rooms telling them, with complete confidence, where the eye should land and why a ceiling reads low when it is not. People pay me for that. They write it down in little books.

And on every one of those mornings I have stood in front of my own wardrobe at ten past eight, negotiating.

You know the negotiation. The trousers that need the top that is in the wash. The dress that needs the other shoes. The one thing that would definitely work, which is also the thing you would spend the whole day being slightly aware of. Fourteen minutes, most days. I timed it once in June out of curiosity and then rather wished I had not.

How it happens

Nobody decides to spend fourteen minutes a day like that.

It builds one sensible purchase at a time. Everything you own is half of an outfit. Each piece needs another piece to be finished, and the other piece is in the wash, or in the wrong colour, or was given away two summers ago. A closet full of halves looks like a closet full of choice. It is not. It is a closet full of homework.

And it is not entirely our own doing either. Look at who these companies photograph. A girl of twenty four, standing perfectly still, in one perfect piece against a white wall. Nothing in any of it says: we thought about a woman of fifty five with a client at nine and a dinner at seven and no interest whatsoever in going home to change in between.

So you buy another half, and you stand there again the next morning.

What I had wrong

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

I thought a jumpsuit was a question of age. I genuinely did. I had filed it somewhere between a crop top and a pair of painter's overalls, under things that are not for me any more, and I had never once opened the file to check what was in it.

Then Émilie put one on in my kitchen in July. She is twenty eight, she works in communications in Toronto, and she has been managing me since she was nine. I said, out loud, chérie, you look as though you are about to paint something.

She did not argue with me. She said: maman, you tell people all day long where to put a line. Look at where this one is.

So I looked.

A room does not read taller because you paint it a pale colour. It reads taller because nothing cuts across it at the wrong height. A body is no different.

That is the whole of it, and it took me about four seconds to see once she had said it. Every single thing I own cuts me in half at the hip. A top ends, trousers begin, and there is a hard horizontal line sitting at the widest part of me. I have spent two decades telling clients to lift a picture rail so a wall stops reading squat, and every morning at ten past eight I was drawing a picture rail across myself.

This one runs from the collar to the ankle with nothing interrupting it. The only break in the whole length is a soft tie at the natural waist, which is high, which is precisely where you want a break to sit. And the cuff rolls once at the bottom so a little ankle shows, and the eye reads the length instead of stopping halfway.

It is not slimming. I dislike that word and it is not what is happening. It is long. There is a difference, and it is the difference people have been paying me for since 2004.

The eleven days

And I still said no.

Eleven days, which Émilie found very funny and which Sophie found entirely predictable. Sophie is my oldest friend and the woman I telephone before I buy anything, because she is the only one who will say no to me. In the end she said: Claire, you have been talking about this thing for a week and a half. Either buy it or stop telling me about it.

It is called the Tessa, and it comes from EmmaVancouver, a small Canadian shop out west that sells directly instead of through the department stores. That mattered more to me than it will to you, but I like knowing where a thing comes from and who I am buying it from.

I ordered the khaki. One. I want to be honest that I ordered exactly one, because I would far rather own four things I love than twelve I tolerate, and because I did not believe in it yet.

See if your size is still in stock

What happened at the lake

The proper test was the long weekend in August.

Five of us go up to Sophie's brother's place in the Eastern Townships every summer, and we have been doing it since our children were small enough to need watching. Three nights. I normally take a bag that weighs more than the food does.

This time I took the khaki, the olive, one pair of sandals and a soft shirt to put over the top on the water in the evening. That was the entire bag. On the Saturday I was dressed in under a minute and I sat outside with my coffee while everybody else was still upstairs deciding.

By the Sunday, three of the four of them had looked it up on their telephones. Danielle ordered the black at the kitchen table on Sunday evening, in front of all of us, which is not like her in the slightest. And Marie Josée, who has known me since 1998 and has never in twenty eight years said one word about anything I have worn, looked up from her book and said: that suits you, that one.

I thought about that for the whole drive home.

Because the compliments are not really the part that stayed with me.

The part that stayed with me is that I did not think about it. Not once, in three days. I did not tug at anything, or fold my arms across my middle, or go up to change before dinner. I swam, and I cooked, and I sat on a dock until it was properly dark, in the same thing I had put on at eight that morning.

Three things I have learned since

One. The line is doing all of the work. It is one piece from the collar to the ankle, and the only horizontal in it is the drawstring, which sits high at the natural waist where you actually want it. Roll the cuff once so a little ankle shows. That is not a styling note, it is the whole mechanism. A shape that is generous through the hip and the thigh only reads as deliberate if you let the length carry it, and the collar and the button front are what keep it from reading as pyjamas.

Two. There is nothing rigid anywhere in it. No waistband, no zip sitting at your side, nothing with a fixed opinion about where your middle ought to be. There is a soft tie, and you set it where you like, and then you forget about it. I wore it for eleven hours on the drive up and back and I never once had to loosen anything, because there is nothing to loosen. At fifty five that is not a small detail. That is most of the thing.

Three. There is one decision left in the morning. Which of the two. Fourteen minutes has become about forty seconds, and I have had that time back every single day since the middle of July. I notice it every single day. The pockets are part of this as well, and I did not expect to care about pockets at my age. They are deep, there are two at the sides and one at the chest, and my telephone and my keys are on me. I walk down to the market on Saturday morning without a bag now.

A word about the colours, since colour is what I wrote to you about last time. There are three of them. The khaki is the one I wear most and it is warmer in a room than it looks on a screen. The olive is the one strangers stop me over, and next to a face it does what a warm green does to a room that faces north. The black exists, and it is beautifully cut, and I am not going to stand here and pretend I have bought it.

About the price

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

The Tessa is $79.95. It was $200.

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

What I found, when I went and looked, was a Canadian shop selling directly and clearing the summer through before the autumn pieces land. There is no department store sitting in the middle taking its half. It is not a complicated explanation, and it is the same one I would give a client about a showroom clearing its floor in September.

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 took a size down out of habit, or somebody had not thought properly about the fact that a jumpsuit is a jumpsuit. Neither of those is a fault in the garment. I took my size from the chart in inches instead of from habit and it was right the first time, and at fifty five I decided I could live with the second one.

And I will say the honest thing about the arms, because nobody else is going to. It has no sleeves. If you are careful about the tops of your arms, as I have been for about a decade, you will want a soft shirt over it, and a soft shirt over it looks intentional rather than apologetic. That is how I wore mine all through July. By the middle of August I had stopped bothering, which I did not see coming and cannot entirely explain to you.

The measurements are printed on the page in inches, bust and waist and hip and length, size by size. That is the one thing I want from a website and almost never get.

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 you are standing in front of your wardrobe at ten past eight negotiating with it, and you have begun to believe that this is simply what mornings are for a woman of our age, then it is worth ten minutes of an evening to go and look.

Not because a jumpsuit changes anything. It does not. I have the same knees, the same kitchen and the same Thursday that I had in June. But there is something in getting dressed once, properly, and then not thinking about yourself again until bedtime, and I had entirely forgotten that it was even available to me. I would rather you did not forget it either.

Two practical things, because I would like to be useful. It runs from an extra small through to a 2XL, and the measurements are there in inches, so take your size from the chart and not from habit. The middle sizes go first, which I found out when I went back for the olive and had to wait for it. And the sale is on because the season is turning, so it will not sit there being patient with you.

I am cooking for nine on Saturday, in a kitchen that was built for two. I already know what I am wearing, and I have known since Tuesday.

I have not stood in front of that wardrobe since July.

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 writes here about what she is actually wearing, which is not something she expected to be doing at fifty five.

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