At 64, I had worn the same navy dress to four weddings in a row, and the reason was hanging two hangers along

A letter from the founder

Six things the Naomie gets right that summer occasion dresses get wrong, from a woman who has spent forty-six years telling other women what to wear and then wore the same thing to four weddings.

Nora · Founder, Nora Sydney · 5 min read

Let me be plain about who is talking, because it makes this worse rather than better. I am Nora, I am sixty-four, and I have been a personal stylist since 1995. Forty-six years of standing outside fitting rooms telling other women what to wear.

And I have worn the same navy dress to four weddings in a row.

Not out of sentiment. Every other dress I own that is smart enough for a wedding is lined, and a lined dress in February is not a dress, it is something to be survived. So the navy one came out again, and again, and by the fourth I had started checking old photographs to see who had already seen it.

Here is what forty-six years taught me about dressing for somebody else’s day in an Australian summer. The dresses come in two piles.

The occasion pile: lined, structured, a jacket that matches, bought for one wedding and correct in every way. You put it on at ten in the morning and by the time the speeches start you are sitting very still.

And the cool pile: cotton, loose, perfectly comfortable, and completely wrong for a church. You would wear it to the shops, not to a wedding.

Correct and unbearable, or comfortable and underdressed. That was the choice, and after four weddings I had simply stopped making it.

The Naomie is in my own boutique, which I should say plainly before you read another line, and it is the first dress I have owned that is in neither pile. Six things, in the order I noticed them.

1You can see the light through the hem

Hold it up to a window and the light comes through the edge of the skirt. That is how fine the fabric is. It is the first thing I checked and it is the whole reason this dress exists for me.

It is not a structured dress and it is not trying to be. There is no lining fighting you, no stiffness through the body.

★★★★★

I wore it to a January wedding in Dubbo and was the only woman at that table who looked the same at five as she did at eleven.

Lorraine M., Dubbo

2The neckline crosses over, and you set it

Most dresses at this price have a neckline sewn to one depth and that is where it stays, whether it suits you or not.

This one wraps across the front, so you decide how open it sits when you put it on, and you can change your mind at the door.

★★★★★

Ordered the red for my son’s engagement party and then the blue a fortnight later. I am not usually a red person.

Marguerite D., Ballarat

3The waist gathers into a tie, not a zip

The fabric gathers into a soft tie at the side. There is no zip digging into your back through the speeches and nothing fixed that you have to fit into exactly.

It marks where your waist is and then it leaves you alone, which is all I have ever wanted a waist to do.

★★★★★

I am short-waisted and nothing ever sits in the right place. This one I just moved up two inches and tied it.

Glenys P., Mooloolaba

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4The hem is uneven on purpose

It is longer at the back and shorter at the front, and it finishes around mid-calf rather than at the ankle.

That is the detail that keeps it from reading as a mother-of-the-bride dress. It shows the ankle, and it moves when you walk instead of hanging there.

5The sleeve is short and soft, and I will be honest about it

It is a soft short sleeve that falls over the top of the arm. It is not a cap sleeve and it is not a strap, and it is not a three-quarter sleeve either.

If you want your arms covered to the elbow, this is not your dress and I would rather tell you that now than have you send it back. If you have been putting a cardigan over everything and you would like the option of not doing that, it is.

★★★★★

I have read enough descriptions that pretend. Thank you for saying what the sleeve actually is.

Rhonda W., Geelong

6Five prints, and it does not stop at a 14

Blue, red, green, brown and a multi-coloured one. The green has small white sprigs on it and is the quiet one, for anybody who has read this far and does not want to be the woman in the print.

It runs from an S right up to a 3XL, AU 6 to AU 24, the same cut the whole way up and the same price at every size, which I wish more places would bother with.

★★★★★

A 3XL that is cut like the small sizes and not like a sack. I did not think I would find one this season.

Noelene F., Bendigo

The Naomie, against the occasion dresses you have been buying

Robyn has photographed weddings on the South Coast for twenty-two years and has an opinion about every woman who walks across a lawn, none of which she keeps to herself. At my niece’s wedding at Berry she came across the grass with the camera still up and asked where the dress was from before she asked how I was. I will leave the verdict with her, because she has no reason to be kind.

About the price

I know what the next question is, because I asked it myself when the first one arrived. How is it that price.

I do not have a shop. No lease, no fit-out, nobody on the floor on a Saturday, and nobody in the middle taking a cut between the dress and you. That is genuinely the whole of it. We have the spring sale on at the moment, which is how the price got to where it is now.

And I do not trust perfect scores either. Ours sit at 4.7 across the boutique, not five, which sounds like real people rather than robots.

Cup Day has been and gone, and the invitations for February are already going out. I will not pretend to know how long the sale runs, because that is not my decision. What I do know is that the women who ask me about this dress ask in November and want it for January.

If you have a wedding, a christening, a long lunch or a sixtieth ahead of you, and you have also been quietly wearing the same thing to all of them, go and find the one that is yours.

Nora

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About the writer. Nora is sixty-four and lives in Sydney, where she founded Nora Sydney, an online boutique. She has been a personal stylist since 1995 and started at eighteen in a small dress shop. She chooses what goes in the boutique; she does not design or make it.

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