The Coral Top That Got Me Out Of Twenty Years Of Black

A note from a reader about the small New Zealand boutique linen top that does not cling, and the colour she almost talked herself out of.

Pam from book club turned up on a Thursday in a coral linen top and the room went quiet in the way rooms do when six women are all thinking the same thing.

I am 64 and I own, or owned, a great deal of black. Black skims, black hides, black goes with everything, and black makes a woman my age quietly invisible in a room full of younger people. I knew that. I had decided it was the price of comfort.

Pam's top came from a small New Zealand boutique called The Mount Coastal Boutique. It is called the Zamma. I want to tell you about it, because if you are a woman my age you may also have a wardrobe that looks like a funeral and a drawer of colour you never wear.

What it is

It is a relaxed top in real linen, 100% linen, not the linen look they sell you with a bit of linen in it. A soft V neck that sits a hand's width below the collarbone with one small button at the base of the V, so it is open but never low. Sleeves to just below the elbow with a little button tab, so they stay rolled. A curved hem that sits over trousers or jeans and dips a touch longer at the back. The body is cut loose and falls straight from the shoulder.

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

Linen does not cling. Not to the middle, not to the backs of the arms, not on a muggy afternoon over the bridge in Tauranga.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is why I could finally wear colour. Black hides what clings. If nothing clings, you do not need black.

The coral, in the first proper sun of the season. It looks like more than it cost.

It is the first colour I have worn in years that did not feel like a costume. It felt like me, before the black.

The lunch in Rotorua

The third time I wore it was lunch with my sister Christine in Rotorua, where we grew up, at the cafe by the lake where Mum used to take us. I wore the coral with white trousers. Christine is 67 and has worn navy since 1985.

She looked at me across the table and said, you look like you did at forty. Then she asked where it was from, and then the woman at the next table, who had been pretending not to listen, asked as well.

Christine ordered the green that night. She has since bought the navy, which I have decided not to comment on.

"You look like you did at forty," Christine said. "What have you done?"

→ Read about the Zamma

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 Zamma is that colour turned out to be the easy part once the fabric was right.

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

1. The linen is the point. It breathes, it moves, and it gets softer every wash. I have worn the coral on a day that went muggy by lunchtime and it never once stuck to me.

2. The V sits where a V should. Open enough to be a proper neckline, high enough that I never once pulled at it in a photo. The one button does the deciding for you.

3. The cut is the same in every size. I asked. A 22 is cut like a 12, only bigger, and every size is the same price, S to 5XL. My one honest tip is that it runs small, so go up one size from what you usually buy, and under the white one I wear a nude bra and it looks lovely.

It washes in the machine and I hang it to dry and do not iron it, because linen is supposed to look like linen, and Graeme says it is the first thing I have bought in years that he noticed without being asked to.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me. Real linen for $68.95 is, frankly, suspicious. So I sat at the kitchen bench and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a linen top like this in the last couple of years.

• Trelise Cooper linen top, $179
• Ricochet, $129
• The Mount Coastal Boutique Zamma, $68.95

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 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 spent years being quietly taught that colour is for other people, and that most of that teaching was done by tops that clung. The Zamma does not cling, so the rule stops applying. There is a difference, and you feel it the second it is on.

I would tell you to buy the coral first, the green second, and the navy only if your sister insists. I would tell you to go up a size. I would tell you to buy two, because if you buy two the stack discount comes off, and you will live in them anyway.

Free NZ Post delivery, usually seven to ten working days, thirty days to change your mind, and a real person called Susan answers the emails, which I tested with a question about the sleeve length and had an answer before the kettle boiled.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been reaching past the colour for the black, please try the coral.

— Wendy