The Dress That Skims The Part Of Me I Stopped Wanting To See

A note from a reader about the small Devon boutique dress that quietly gave her back the nerve to be in the photograph instead of always being the one holding the camera.

I am 61 years old, and for the better part of six years I have been the woman who is never in the photograph.

Not by accident. By design. At my granddaughter Lily's birthday, at Christmas, on holiday last summer, I was always the one who offered to take the picture. I told everyone it was because I liked being behind the camera. The truth, which I will tell you because you are a stranger and it is easier, is that I had stopped being able to look at pictures of myself.

It was always the same thing. My eyes went straight to the middle of me. To my tummy, and the way every dress I owned seemed to find it and cling to it and announce it. I would see a photo my daughter Emma had sent, a perfectly lovely one of the three of us, and I would not see my own face or my own smile. I would see the one part of me I had quietly decided to be at war with.

So I stepped out of the frame. For six years.

What I had been doing instead

I want to be honest about the wardrobe, because I think a lot of women my age have the same one.

Drawers full of summer dresses I had bought hopefully and worn once. Each one had the same fate. I would put it on, turn to the side in the bedroom mirror, see how it pulled across the middle, and take it straight back off. Then I would reach for the safe thing. A loose tunic over leggings. Not because I liked it, but because it was the only thing that did not start an argument with me before nine in the morning.

I had decided that was simply what getting dressed was now. A small daily negotiation I always lost.

I had not bought a dress for the joy of it in years. I bought them the way you buy a smoke alarm. Reluctantly, and hoping not to think about it again.

What the Luna actually is

The dress is called the Luna. It comes from a small coastal boutique called Torquay Boutique that I had never heard of until a neighbour of mine wore hers to a lunch and I could not stop asking her about it.

It is a relaxed, boho style dress with a soft A line shape. Not a tent, and not the other thing either. The cut falls from a soft V neckline and then drifts away from the body through the middle, so it follows you instead of gripping you. The sleeves are a gentle lantern shape, soft at the upper arm, which is the exact place I have spent six years tugging other people's sleeves down to reach.

It has a quiet geometric print rather than a loud one. And it has, in the plainest words I can find, proper coverage through the tummy. Not by hiding you inside something shapeless, but by skimming the part you were worried about and letting the rest of you be seen.

That is the whole trick of it. It skims the part I stopped wanting to see, so that the rest of me, my face, my arms, the way I actually look when I am laughing at something Graham has said, gets to be the thing in the photograph again.

Hanging by the window this morning. The first dress in years I have not hidden in.

It does not flatten you or hide you. It just stops pointing at the one place you did not want it to point.

→ Read about the Luna

The photograph

Three weeks ago we took Lily to the coast for the day. I was wearing the Luna, the blue one, the first time I had worn it out.

Emma, who is thirty four and lives in London, had come up for the weekend. At some point she handed her phone to a stranger on the front and gathered us together, and before I could do my usual thing, the offering to take it instead, the picture was already taken.

That evening she sent it to me. I almost did the thing I always do, which is glance and then put the phone face down. But I did not. I looked at it properly.

For once my eyes did not go to the middle of me. They went to Lily's hand in mine, and to the fact that I was, plainly, having a lovely time, and that I looked like myself.

I rang Emma and I will admit my voice was not quite steady. She said, "Mum, are you alright?" I told her I was more than alright. I told her it was the first photograph of myself I had liked in about six years. There was a long quiet on the line. Then she asked me where the dress had come from, and she ordered her own before we had even hung up. She ordered hers in the green.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me from ordering. The Luna for £45.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of tea in the garden and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a flattering boho dress like this in the last few years.

• Phase Eight maxi, £120
• Monsoon, £79
• Torquay Luna, £45.95

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …how??

What I would tell you if we were friends

If we were in my garden with a cup of tea, and you had asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that women our age have been quietly told by the entire high street that the choice is either a tent or something built for someone half our age, and that the in between, the dress that simply skims and lets you be, is a great deal harder to find than it should be. The Luna is that in between.

I would tell you that the blue is the one I reach for the most, the green is the one Emma took, and there is a soft purple and a red and a couple of others, and I would tell you not to think too hard about it because you will likely want a second one anyway. If you buy two, the stack discount comes off, and you will end up alternating them without meaning to.

I would tell you, gently, that the popular sizes are already thinning out. When I looked again this morning the middle sizes in blue and green were the ones going first, which always seems to be the way. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do, not a tidy day later.

And I would tell you the real thing, the thing underneath all of it. If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been the one who always offers to hold the camera, please do not wait. There are six years of photographs I am not in, and I cannot get those back. I would not let you do the same for the sake of a dress.

Get back in the picture, while the sizes are still there.

— Susan