The Four Second Dress That Finally Got Me Out Of Tunics

A note from a reader about the small New Zealand boutique dress she can pull on for the Saturday market, wear to lunch, and never once feel touching her middle.

For about five years now, my summer uniform has been a tunic over leggings.

You know the one. Long enough to cover the middle, loose enough to hide it, and by eleven in the morning it is stuck to the small of my back. I told myself it was practical. The truth is I had stopped believing there was a dress that would let me look like a woman who had made an effort without asking my stomach to behave.

Three weeks ago a friend from my walking group mentioned a dress from a small New Zealand boutique called The Mount Coastal Boutique. It is called the Tansy. I want to tell you about it, because if you are a woman my age you may have quietly settled into the same uniform.

What it is

It is a knee length swing dress with a proper shirt collar and a soft V at the neck. Short sleeves that cover the top of the arm and stop before the elbow. A tiny dot print on the blue and the green, and a soft turquoise floral on the third one. The hem dips a little lower at the back than the front, so it moves when you walk.

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

It falls from the shoulder and does not touch my middle at all.

That is the whole thing. The swing cut floats straight past my stomach, so there is air where I have always wanted air, and the collar does something I did not expect. It makes it a dress. Not a beach thing, not a nightie with a print, a dress I would wear to lunch. 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 a cardigan.

The turquoise one in the garden on Sunday. Four seconds from the hanger to out the door.

It is the first dress in years that asks nothing of me. No belt, no slip, no holding my breath.

The market

The third time I wore it was the Saturday market at the Mount, with my daughter Anna down from Auckland and my granddaughter Olive on my hip for the first ten minutes and on Anna's for the rest.

A woman at the fruit stall, about my age, looked at the dress and then at me and said, where did you get that, I need one. I told her. Then the woman behind her in the queue said, so do I.

Anna laughed at me all the way back to the car. She said, Mum, you have been wearing that grey tunic for five summers and today you were stopped twice before the coffee.

"Twice before the coffee," Anna said. "In a dress you put on in four seconds."

→ Read about the Tansy

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 Tansy is that it gave me all three without a compromise.

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 swing 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 collar changes everything. A shirt collar and a soft V make it a dress you can wear to a lunch, a birthday, the doctor. It never reads as a cover up.

3. It is genuinely light. I have worn it through a proper Bay of Plenty scorcher and it never once stuck to me. The sleeves cover the top of the arm and stop before they can trap any heat.

It has the kind of easy shape that lets me kneel in the garden, sit through 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 Tansy for $84.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at the kitchen table and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a swing dress like this in the last couple of years.

• Trelise Cooper swing dress, $159
• Ricochet, $109
• The Mount Coastal Boutique Tansy, $84.95

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 taught that a soft middle means a tunic. The Tansy is not a tunic. It is a real dress with a collar and a shape, that simply happens to be cut so it never touches the part of you that you have been hiding. There is a difference, and you feel it the second it is on.

I would tell you the blue dot is the one I reach for most, the turquoise floral is the one Anna says suits me best, and the green is the one that is already almost gone. 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 blue were nearly out. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been reaching for the tunic every single morning, please do not wait.

While the sizes are still in stock.

— Wendy