The Long Dress I Was Always Told I Was Too Short For

A note from a reader about the small New Zealand boutique dress that took her from the school pick up to a sixtieth without changing, and made her stop apologising for her height.

I am five foot two, and for most of my life I have been told, kindly, that long dresses are not for me.

You know the advice. They will swamp you. They will drag. Stick to the knee. So I did, for forty years, while every summer the women I most admired at the markets floated past in long, loose, printed dresses looking cool and unbothered, and I stood there in a knee length something, sucking my stomach in.

Three weeks ago a friend of mine mentioned a dress from a small New Zealand boutique called The Mount Coastal Boutique. It is called the Mana. I want to tell you about it, because if you are a woman my age you may have been quietly told the same thing about the same dress.

What it is

It is a long, floaty dress in a soft block print, the kind of small repeating pattern that looks hand printed. A soft V neck with two little tassel ties. Three quarter sleeves with a small frill at the cuff, so the top of the arm is covered and the forearm is free. The body is relaxed all the way down, gathered softly into a tier, and finishes in a gentle frill at the hem.

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

It skims my middle, and it does not swamp me.

That is the whole thing. The cut falls from the shoulder and simply floats past my stomach, so there is room where I have always wanted room, and because it is light and the sleeves are three quarter, it does not drown me the way I had been warned a long dress would. I put it on in the bedroom, turned side on to the mirror the way I always brace myself to do, and did not reach for something shorter.

The pink one on the wardrobe door this morning. The first long dress I have owned since my twenties.

It does not hide me and it does not swamp me. It just floats, and lets me forget both things.

The sixtieth

The fourth time I wore it was a friend's sixtieth, straight from picking my granddaughter Olive up from school, because I had run out of time to change and decided the dress would have to do.

My daughter Anna was down from Auckland for the weekend, and she watched me walk in from the car park. She said, Mum, you look about a foot taller. Then three women at the table asked where it was from, one after another, and one of them was the friend whose birthday it was.

Anna took a photo of me with the cake and I did not do my usual little step out of the frame. I looked like myself, and I looked, for once, like the women at the markets.

"About a foot taller," Anna said. "In the dress you were told not to wear."

→ Read about the Mana

What changed in three weeks

I had not been looking to feel pretty. By a certain age you quietly lower that bar to comfortable, and then again to covered. What surprised me about the Mana is that it gave me all three without me choosing.

Three things I noticed in the first week, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. The cut does the work. The relaxed shape falls from the top and floats past the middle on its own. I stopped thinking about my stomach the moment it was on.

2. The length is kind, not heavy. Light fabric, three quarter sleeves and a soft tier mean it moves instead of dragging. Nobody has told me I am too short for it. They have asked where it came from.

3. The print is forgiving. The small block print keeps the eye moving over the whole dress instead of settling on any one part of me. I have learned, late, what a difference a quiet print makes.

It is light enough that I have worn it through real New Zealand heat without wilting, and it has the kind of relaxed shape that lets me kneel in the garden, sit at a long lunch, and bend down for Bruce, our little rescue terrier cross, without the dress fighting me once.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me. The Mana for $103.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a long printed dress like this in the last couple of years.

• Trelise Cooper maxi, $189
• Ricochet, $139
• The Mount Coastal Boutique Mana, $103.95

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

What I'd tell you if we were friends

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

I would tell you that women our age have spent years being quietly told which dresses are and are not for us, and most of it was said by people who never had to wear them through a Bay of Plenty summer. The Mana is a real dress with a real shape, that simply happens to be cut so it skims the part of you that you have stopped wanting to see, and light enough that it lifts you instead of drowning you.

I would tell you the pink is the one I reach for most, the green is the one Anna says suits me best, and the blue is the one I bought for the sixtieth. I would tell you to buy two. If you buy two the stack discount comes off, and you will live in them anyway.

I would tell you that the popular sizes are already showing as low. When I checked again this morning a couple of the middle sizes in pink were nearly out. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been walking past the long dresses because someone once told you not to, please do not wait.

While the sizes are still in stock.

— Wendy