A Letter From a Reader: The Moana (Elaine)
For thirty summers I wore beige to the beach. Then a stranger on the pier walked past me looking like the water.
Six things a sleeveless print midi gets right that thirty years of beige linen and black capris got wrong, written down by a customer, not a shop.
Elaine · Customer · Hervey Bay, Queensland · 5 min read
Peter and I walk the Urangan Pier most evenings, out to the end and back, to watch the light go over the bay. It is nearly a kilometre each way, and I have done it for years in the same uniform as every other woman our age on that pier: a beige linen shirt, black capri pants, and a cardigan tied round my shoulders in case the breeze comes up. Comfortable, sensible, and completely forgettable.
One evening in October a woman passed us going the other way in a sleeveless dress that was the exact colour of the water under the pier, teal and green and deep blue with little flecks of gold, like sunlight on the shallows. Peter actually stopped walking. I turned round, caught her up at the rail, and asked her plainly where it was from.
Her name is Robyn, she is from Maryborough, and she laughed and said everybody asks. The dress is called the Moana, from Portsea Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. I ordered one that week, fully expecting to send it back. I did not, and I wrote to the boutique to tell them why, and they asked if they could put my letter up for other women to read. So here it is, the six things this dress gets right.
Summer dresses for women our age, if you have looked lately, come in two piles. The first is the safe pile, beige and navy and black, the kind of thing nobody has ever remembered you in. The second is the bright pile, loud florals on a stark white, which looks lovely on the girl in the photograph and like a tablecloth on the rest of us.
A dress nobody notices, or a dress that wears you. Robyn at the rail was the proof that there is a third pile.
Mine, two weeks later, on the boardwalk along the Esplanade. Peter took this one.
The print reads as colour, not as pattern
This is the thing I would tell you if I only had a minute. Up close the Moana is hundreds of little circles, like a mosaic. From across the pier it reads as one lovely wash of colour, teal at the top, deep ocean blue at the hem, with a glint of gold through it. A busy print shouts from across a room. This one just looks like you have been to the beach and brought some of it home.
The print up close. You can see why I could not stop touching it.
It is sleeveless, and it is cool
I will be honest, sleeveless was the part that nearly stopped me. I have been quietly hiding the tops of my arms since about 1995. But a Hervey Bay summer does not care about my arms, and Robyn wore hers with a little white cardigan over her shoulders for the walk back, which is exactly what I do now. On a thirty-degree afternoon it is the coolest thing I own, and when the sea breeze comes up the cardigan goes on and nobody is any the wiser.
A soft gathered waist gives it a shape
The other worry with a loose summer dress is that it turns into a tent. The Moana is gathered softly at the waist and the skirt falls relaxed from there, so there is a shape to you instead of a lot of fabric. Nothing pulls and nothing clings across the tummy, and it moves when you walk, which on the end of a pier in a breeze is a lovely thing.
On the wardrobe door, hat and basket ready for the next walk.
Midi length, the right side of the knee
It falls well below the knee to the middle of the calf, which is the length I have been looking for for years. Long enough that you never think about sitting down, getting out of the car or a gust of wind on the pier, short enough that it does not drag on the sand or catch on the boardwalk. Flat sandals, and that is the whole outfit.
Light, breathable, and nothing to do up
The fabric is light and soft and lets the air through, and it pulls on over your head. No zip down the back, no buttons, nothing to ask Peter to help with. It came out of the parcel with barely a crease, and it goes in the wash and comes out the same.
My second one, the blue Azura, the morning it arrived.
The same cut from S to 5XL, in twenty-seven prints
Every size from S right up to 5XL, the same relaxed cut the whole way up, which I wish more places would bother with. And the Moana is only one of them. The collection runs to twenty-seven prints, from soft watercolour gardens to blue damask and painted roses, all the same shape. I went back for the Azura, the blue one, and Lyn, Peter's sister, is getting the watercolour Monet for Christmas. I have not told her yet.
Lyn's Christmas present, the Monet, folded on my kitchen table where she will not see it.
See The Summer Print Midi Collection →The Moana, against the dresses I had been buying
You can buy a summer dress almost anywhere. I know, because I have owned most of them, and given the rest to the op shop. Here is the difference, laid out plainly.
Beige, navy or black, every summer
Or loud flowers on a stark white
Shapeless, or tight in all the wrong places
Too short for the pier, or long enough to drag
Nobody has ever asked where you got it
A print that reads as one wash of sea colour
Teal, green and ocean blue with a glint of gold
Softly gathered waist, relaxed skirt
Midi length, to the middle of the calf
Asked about at the end of the Urangan Pier
About the price
I will be straightforward about the price, because it was the thing that made me suspicious. The Moana is A$79.95, and it was A$319.95. Every dress in the collection is the same.
The boutique says the sale price is about making room for the summer stock, selling directly, with no middleman taking a cut. That is their arithmetic, not mine. What I can tell you is that I have paid more than that for a beige linen shirt I never once got a compliment in, and I have now bought two of these.
If you have spent thirty summers in beige because it felt like the safe thing for a woman our age, this is the dress I would hand you instead.
— Elaine
The Moana & The Summer Print Midi Collection
- Moana: teal, green and ocean-blue mosaic with a glint of gold
- 27 prints, every one A$79.95
- Sleeveless, softly gathered waist
- Midi length, relaxed and breathable, pull-on
- Sizes S to 5XL, free delivery across Australia
Summer sale on now. The middle sizes are already going.