At 62, I stopped trying to wear colour and started carrying it instead
At 62, I stopped trying to wear colour and started carrying it instead
Six things the Lauren bag gets right, from a woman who had given up on anything brighter than navy.
Caroline Richards · Customer · Nottinghamshire · 5 min read
For about fifteen years I have been quietly trying to wear colour, and quietly failing at it. I buy the coral jumper. I get it home. I put it on in front of the wardrobe mirror and I take it straight back off again, because the colour is up there next to my face doing something unkind to me, and I cannot say precisely what, only that I look tired in it.
Then it hangs there with the tags on until one of us gives in, and it is never the jumper.
So the wardrobe is navy, black, grey and a sort of apologetic oatmeal. Not because I like those colours particularly. Because they are the ones that have never once made me look poorly.
How it happens
It is not a decision, it is an accumulation. You have one bad morning in a bright blouse and you do not wear it again. Then another. And over about a decade the things that are left hanging up are the ones that never caused you any trouble, which is a very different thing from the ones you actually like.
And you do notice. I noticed most in photographs, and at funerals, which I am afraid is a thing that happens more at my age, where I would look round the room and realise that I could not have picked myself out of the crowd. Everybody over sixty in a dark coat. Including me.
My friend Sue, who has never had this problem because she is a redhead and wears emerald green like it is nothing, said to me once, you do know you are allowed, don't you. And I said yes. And carried on wearing navy.
What I had wrong
Here is the bit that took me far too long, and I am slightly annoyed about it, because it is obvious once somebody says it out loud.
The problem was never colour. The problem was colour sitting six inches under my chin, where it has nowhere to go but onto my face. That is why the coral jumper looked wrong and the coral jumper on the hanger looked lovely. Same jumper. Different distance.
The colour did not have to be on me. It only had to be with me.
Which means it can go on the thing hanging at your hip, where it is a good two feet from your face and cannot do you any harm at all. And you get to keep every plain navy and black and grey thing you already own, because those are now the background it sits against.
I found the Lauren bag at Nottingham Boutique, a little shop that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. It is a patchwork, terracotta and raspberry and steel blue and cream and tan all pieced together, and it was twenty nine pounds ninety five, which I will come back to.
The day it came. It arrived in a proper box, which I was not expecting.
THE COLOUR SITS AT YOUR HIP, NOT AT YOUR FACE
This is the whole thing and everything else is detail. A bag is the one bright thing you can own that never has to pass the mirror test, because it is nowhere near your complexion. I can carry terracotta and raspberry all day long and look exactly as well as I did in plain navy, which I never could when I was wearing them. Fifteen years of buying the wrong brightly coloured thing, and the answer was to move it down two feet.
I have a drawer of scarves I cannot wear because of my colouring. Never thought to put the colour in the bag instead. Obvious now.
Christine A., EdwaltonIT GOES WITH THE PLAIN THINGS I ALREADY OWN
I had assumed a patchwork bag would be the fussiest thing in the world to match, and that I would end up needing a whole outfit built round it. The opposite turned out to be true. Because there are warm colours and cool colours in it, terracotta and tan on one side and steel blue and cream on the other, there is something in it that picks up whatever you have got on. It works over my navy coat, over the black one, and over the camel one I almost never wore because nothing went with it. I have not had to buy a single thing to go with this bag.
On the hall table, where it lives now, next to the dark things it goes with.
Expected it to clash with everything. It has not clashed with anything yet, and I am mostly in black.
Val M., Radcliffe on TrentEVERYTHING HAS ITS OWN POCKET
There is a zip pocket on the front, another one on the back, an open pocket down each side, and slip pockets inside the lining. I realise that is a dull paragraph to read. It is not a dull thing to live with. My keys live in one side pocket and my phone in the other and I can get at either of them without stopping and without putting the bag down, which if you have ever stood in the rain outside your own front door excavating a handbag with one arm full of shopping, you will understand is not a small matter.
Everything laid out before it goes in. It is lined, with pockets inside as well.
Pockets inside and out, and I stopped losing my reading glasses the week it arrived.
Brenda P., SouthwellONE STRAP, TWO WAYS TO CARRY IT
The strap lengthens and shortens, so it is a shoulder bag when I want it to be and goes across the body when I am on a bus or in a crowd or walking back from town in the dark. I have a shoulder on one side that is not what it was and I did not realise how much I had been shifting bags from arm to arm until I stopped having to. It is one bag doing the job of two, which at this price is worth saying plainly.
The buckle that takes it up and down. You can see the open side pocket too.
Wear it crossbody for the market and on the shoulder the rest of the time. The adjuster is easy enough to do without looking.
Sheila R., ArnoldIT IS PIECED, NOT PRINTED
I want to be fair about this because I half expected a photograph of a patchwork printed flat onto a bag, which is what you usually get at this money. It is not that. The panels are separate pieces of leather-style material stitched to one another, and you can see the stitching running between them and feel the ridge of it under your thumb. The front is an irregular patchwork with a braided tan strip down the middle of it. The back is a different pattern altogether, diamonds set so they look like rows of little cubes. Somebody thought about it.
The back, which is a different pattern from the front. I did not notice for three days.
You can see the seams and feel them. It does not have that flat printed look I was worried about from the photographs.
Jean H., BulwellIT IS WORTH MOST IN THE DARK MONTHS
I bought it in the spring and liked it. I have properly loved it since the clocks went back, because October through to March is when every single person you pass is in a dark coat, yourself included, and one warm bright thing at your side is the difference between looking like you are getting through the winter and looking like you have given up on it. It is the cheapest thing I have ever bought that changed how I feel walking into a room.
Got it for the winter and it has done exactly what I hoped. Everything else I own in January is grey.
Marion T., HucknallThe Lauren, against the coral jumper on the hanger
I still have the jumper. It is a perfectly nice jumper. But here is the comparison honestly set out, because I suspect a great many women reading this have the equivalent of that jumper hanging up somewhere.
Bought three times over the years, in three different colours
The colour sits right under my chin
Needs me to be in the right mood and the right light
Worn twice, both times reluctantly
Still has the tag on one of them
Twenty nine pounds ninety five, bought once
The colour sits at my hip, two feet from my face
Goes over navy, black and camel without being asked
Out of the house most days since it arrived
Lives on the hall table rather than in a cupboard
About the price
It is £29.95. It was £60.00.
I am always a little suspicious of a patchwork at that money, because patchwork is where corners get cut. The cheap version is a photograph of a patchwork printed onto one flat sheet, and you can spot it the moment it is in your hands, and you feel slightly silly for having believed the picture.
This one is made of actual separate panels with stitching between them, there is a braided strip running down the front, and the edges are bound in tan all the way round. I am not going to tell you it is a designer bag. I am telling you it is honest about what it is, which at thirty pounds is all I wanted.
I read the reviews afterwards, which is 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, "It is the only thing I own that strangers stop me about, and I have owned some expensive handbags." That would have decided it for me if I had read it first.
What I would tell you if we were friends
If you were sat here with a cup of tea I would ask you one question, which is whether there is something hanging in your wardrobe with the tag still on it, in a colour you loved in the shop.
Because if there is, I do not think you got it wrong. I think you put it in the wrong place. Colour next to a face that has been through sixty two winters is a difficult ask, and it is not a failing in you that it does not always work. Colour at arm's length is an entirely different proposition, and nobody ever tells you that, so you spend fifteen years concluding you are not a colour person.
I am a colour person. I was just wearing it too close.
If any of that sounds like you, this is a very cheap place to find out whether I am right.
Caroline
LAUREN | Colourful Vintage Bag
- Patchwork panels of soft, textured leather-style material, stitched together
- Terracotta, rose, navy, cream and tan, with braided trim and tan edging
- A zip pocket on the front, another on the back, and an open pocket each side
- Roomy zip-top main compartment, lined, with slip pockets inside
- Adjustable strap, so it wears on the shoulder or across the body
- A different patchwork pattern on the back from the front
- Free UK delivery and 30 day returns
The autumn sale is on now, half price.