At 62, every pattern I owned was too small to see
At 62, every pattern I owned was too small to see
Six things the Amery overshirt gets right, from a woman who spent about twenty years in tiny flowers.
Caroline Richards · Customer · Nottinghamshire · 5 min read
I want to tell you about a photograph, because it is the thing that finally made the penny drop. My niece got married in June and there is a picture of the four of us outside the church, me and my sister and two of her friends, and we are all of us in a tiny print. Little flowers on me. Little leaves on Jean. Something small and grey and swirly on my sister. From six feet away not one of those patterns was a pattern at all. We looked like four women in four different shades of mud.
And the thing is, I had chosen mine. I had stood in a shop and picked it, and I had thought, that is nice, that is not too much.
Not too much. That was the phrase. It is the phrase I have been shopping with for about two decades without ever once stopping to ask what I was so worried about.
How it happens
Somewhere in your forties the shops start quietly offering you smaller and smaller prints. Ditsy florals. Little sprigs. Faint paisleys in colours that have had the life washed out of them. Nobody announces it. You just notice, if you ever look properly, that the bold things have moved to a different part of the shop and nobody expects you to go in there any more.
And it is easy to agree with, because a small pattern feels like the safe choice. It will not shout. It will not be a mistake. If you are standing in a changing room on a Tuesday feeling about as confident as a damp tea towel, safe is an extremely attractive offer.
So you buy small. And then you buy small again. And after twenty years of it every single patterned thing you own is something you have to be within three feet of to even notice.
What I had wrong
I thought the risk was in the pattern being too bold. That a big print would look like I was trying, or worse, like I was trying and had misjudged it.
What I had not worked out is that a tiny print does not read as modest. From any normal distance, across a room, in a photograph, it does not read at all. It just goes blurry and turns the whole garment a sort of soft nothing colour, and a soft nothing colour is not restraint. It is camouflage.
A small pattern is not a quiet pattern. It is a pattern nobody can see.
A big one is actually the easier thing to wear, which took me entirely by surprise. There is one idea on it and you can see what it is, and because you can see it, it reads as something you chose on purpose rather than something you settled for.
The Amery turned up at Nottingham Boutique, a little shop that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. It is an overshirt in a soft denim-style blue, covered in black spots the size of the palm of my hand, and it was thirty one pounds ninety five, which I will come back to.
The day it came. I had it on over my nightie within about four minutes.
THE DOTS ARE BIG ENOUGH TO BE A DECISION
This is the whole reason I am writing. The spots are roughly the size of my palm and there are only about a dozen of them across the front, scattered about rather than lined up in rows, and some of them run straight over the chest pockets as though nobody could be bothered to stop them. That is what makes it look deliberate. You can see it from the other side of a car park. Nobody looks at this and thinks, poor thing, she has had that a while.
One spot, next to a pocket, so you can see the size of them.
I have not worn a big print since about 1998. Put this on and my daughter said, oh, there you are. I have thought about that for a week.
Pauline G., GunthorpeIT IS A SHIRT ONE DAY AND A JACKET THE NEXT
Buttoned up it is a shirt and it is the whole outfit. Left open over a plain tee it is a light layer and the plain tee does all the work underneath. I did not buy it expecting two things, and I have now worn it both ways in the same week, which for thirty pounds is not a bad return. On the days that cannot decide what they are doing, which is most of October round here, it is the thing I reach for because it does not commit me to anything either.
Buttoned, with dark trousers. This is the version I wear out.
Open over a black polo neck for the school run and buttoned up for lunch out. Two different tops as far as anyone else is concerned.
Denise W., WoodboroughTHE BACK IS LONGER THAN THE FRONT
The hem is cut on a curve so it is shorter at the front and drops down a good way at the back, with splits up both side seams. I am going to be plain about why that matters, because nobody ever puts it in the description properly. It covers you when you sit down. It covers you on a bar stool, on a dining chair, getting out of the car, and bending to get something off a low shelf in the supermarket. I have spent years tugging things down behind me. This one is already down.
The back. You can see how much further down it comes.
The long back is the bit I would tell a friend about. I wear it over leggings and I am not pulling at myself all day.
Hilary M., OxtonIT IS CUT LOOSE ON PURPOSE
Dropped shoulders and a roomy body, so it hangs off you rather than following you about. There is a difference between a thing that is loose because that is the shape of it and a thing that is loose because you have gone up a size to get away with something, and you can feel which one you have got on. This is the first kind. There is room to put a jumper underneath it without the whole thing going tight across the back, which in January is going to matter.
Hanging on the wardrobe, which is where it lives, because I am always about to wear it.
Properly roomy without being a tent. I am a 16 and took the 14/16 and it is generous.
Christine B., EpperstoneIT IS SOFT, NOT THE STIFF SORT
It looks like denim in the photographs and I will admit I was braced for that board-stiff feeling you get with a new denim jacket, where you cannot put your arms down for a fortnight. It is a denim-style fabric and it is soft from the first morning. You can push the sleeves up. The cuffs turn back and stay turned back, and there is a lighter shade on the inside of the turn, which is a small thing that somebody bothered with.
No breaking in needed, which was my worry. Soft straight out of the bag and it moves with you.
Ann T., PapplewickTHE SIZES GO UP TO A 20
UK 8/10 through to UK 18/20, which I am mentioning because I know exactly how it feels to find the thing you like and then get to the bottom of the page and discover it stops at a 16. It does not here. And given it is cut loose anyway, if you are between sizes I would take the smaller of the two rather than the bigger, which is the opposite of the advice I usually give.
An 18/20 that is actually an 18/20 and not a hopeful 16. I ordered a second one in the burgundy.
Sylvia R., LinbyThe Amery, against the little flowered blouse from the wedding
I have not thrown the blouse out. It has not done anything wrong. But set side by side it is quite clear what I have been doing to myself for twenty years.
Chosen because it was not too much
From six feet away, no pattern at all
Needs tugging down every time I sit
Fitted, so a jumper underneath is out
Worn to one wedding and back in the wardrobe
Chosen because I could see it from across the shop
Reads from the other side of a car park
Already long at the back, nothing to tug
Loose on purpose, with room underneath
On three or four days a week since it arrived
About the price
It is £31.95. It was £64.00.
I had a good look at the stitching when it arrived, because thirty odd pounds for something this size made me wonder where the corner had been cut. The seams are topstitched in a lighter thread, the pockets are properly sewn on rather than tacked, the buttons are all on straight and the hem curve is even all the way round the back. I am not telling you it is a hand-finished thing. I am telling you I could not find the corner they had cut.
I went and read the reviews afterwards, which is entirely the wrong order, I know. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some sites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, "First thing I have bought in years that I did not immediately want to hide in." That would have decided it for me, had I read it first.
Put out the night before, which I have not done since I was working.
What I would tell you if we were friends
If you were sat here with a cup of tea I would get my phone out and show you that photograph outside the church, and I would ask you to find me in it.
Because the thing I had wrong was not about clothes really. I thought I was being tasteful, and what I was actually doing was making myself slightly harder to see, one small safe purchase at a time, for about twenty years. Nobody did that to me. I did it, in good lighting, with my own money, every time I picked up the quiet one.
I was not dressing modestly. I was dressing to be overlooked, and I had got rather good at it.
If any of that lands, you do not need to change everything. Put one thing in your wardrobe that somebody could describe from across a room. This is the one I started with.
Caroline
AMERY | Polka Dot Overshirt
- Big, bold polka dot print on a soft denim-style fabric
- Relaxed fit with dropped shoulders, so it hangs loose
- Button front, so it wears open as a layer or buttoned as a shirt
- Longer curved back hem with side splits, for extra coverage
- Two patch chest pockets and long sleeves with turn-back cuffs
- UK 8/10 (S) to UK 18/20 (3XL), in four colours
- Free UK delivery and 30 day returns
The autumn sale is on now, half price.