The Green Dress, And The Day I Left My Handbag At Home

A note from a reader about the small New Zealand boutique dress with two deep pockets that carried everything for a whole day with her granddaughter, so both her hands were free.

Anna brought Olive down from Auckland for a long weekend in October, and on the Saturday Anna went to a friend's wedding in Katikati and left the two of us together for the whole day. Olive is five. I am 64. I had a plan for the park by the harbour, the library and a fish and chip lunch, and I had a handbag the size of a small suitcase.

You know the bag. Phone, keys, glasses, purse, tissues, a cardigan just in case, and now a drink bottle, a spare pair of knickers in a zip bag, a pink hair clip and two mandarins. Every time Olive wanted my hand, I had to put the bag down first. Every time I put the bag down, I had to remember where.

That morning I put on a dress I had bought three weeks before from a small New Zealand boutique called The Mount Coastal Boutique. It is called the Kwani, and I have it in the green. I want to tell you about one thing it does, because it is the thing that changed the day.

What it is

A knee length dress in real 100% cotton, in a soft olive green, the colour of the bush after rain. Short sleeves that fall at the top of the arm, not halfway down it. A cocoon cut that falls from the chest and skims the middle without holding on. It also comes in black, orange and beige, sizes S to 5XL, every size the same price.

But I want to be honest about the one part that actually mattered.

Two deep pockets, one each side, deep enough to stand a phone up in.

That is the whole thing. Phone and keys on the left. Glasses, tissues and the hair clip on the right. A mandarin in each, because a five year old will want one exactly when you are furthest from the car. I left the handbag on the hall table, and I did not go back for it.

In the garden before we left, with the straw hat Olive made me take. Everything for the day is in the two pockets.

Two hands free for a whole day with a five year old. I had forgotten what that felt like.

The park, the library and the chips

At the park she wanted pushing on the swing for twenty minutes, then she wanted to hold my hand on the way to the duck pond, and then she wanted to hold both my hands to jump off the low wall about forty times. Both hands, every time. Nothing on my shoulder sliding down my arm, nothing on the bench for me to keep looking back at.

At the library she chose eleven books, and I carried them out in two arms with my phone and keys exactly where I had left them. At lunch, on a bench by the water, I peeled a mandarin out of one pocket while she ate her chips, and she looked at me as though I had done a magic trick.

When Anna came to collect her on the Sunday, Olive told her that Nana has a dress with a shop in it. Anna laughed, and then she asked me where it was from.

"Nana's dress has a shop in it," Olive told her mother. It is the best review anything I own has ever had.

→ Read about the Kwani

What changed in a day

I had not been looking for pockets. By a certain age you accept that women's clothes do not have them, or have the little stitched ones that hold nothing, and that you are the woman who carries the bag. What surprised me about the Kwani is how much of my day the bag had been taking.

Three things I noticed, and I wrote them down that night because I knew I would want to remember.

1. The pockets are real. Deep enough that the phone stands up in them and does not slide out when I sit on a park bench or bend to do up a small shoe.

2. The cotton breathes. Real 100% cotton. By two o'clock the day had gone warm and muggy, and the dress was not sticking anywhere, not to my back at the swings and not to the car seat on the way home.

3. It skims. The cut falls from the chest and sits away from the middle, so the weight in the pockets does not pull it out of shape. It hangs the same full as it does empty.

It is easy to sit on the grass in, easy to get back up from, and easy to bend down for Bruce, our rescue terrier cross, who came too and wanted his share of the chips.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me. A real cotton dress with real pockets for $96.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at the kitchen bench and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a dress like this in the last couple of years.

• Trelise Cooper cotton dress, $229
• Ricochet dress with pockets, $159
• The Mount Coastal Boutique Kwani, $96.95

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

It came by NZ Post in eight working days, tracked. When I wrote to ask whether I was a 2XL or a 3XL, a woman called Susan wrote back the same afternoon with the measurements, and she was right.

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If we were on my back deck with a cuppa and you asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that women our age have been carrying a handbag for the three things we actually need for so long that we have stopped noticing the weight of it on one shoulder. The Kwani is a proper dress with a shape that simply happens to carry those three things for you.

I would tell you the green is the one I live in, and that the page says the green is almost sold out, which is why I am writing this now and not next week. Buy two and the stack discount comes off, and the second one should be the black.

I would tell you it runs true to size, S to 5XL, the same price in every size, and that it sits just on the knee on a woman of five foot five.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been putting your bag down every time someone small wants your hand, please do not wait.

While your size is still there.

— Wendy