I Spent Years Feeling Hot, Clingy And Frumpy In Summer. Then I Found One Striped Dress.

A note from a reader about the small Florida boutique dress that finally let her feel cool, covered, and quietly put together on the hottest days of the year.

I am 61 years old, and for the last few summers I had quietly started to dread getting dressed in the morning.

Not in a dramatic way. Just a small, daily sinking feeling. It is hot here from May until almost October, and somewhere along the way every dress I owned had started to feel like a punishment.

The thin ones clung to me the moment I stepped outside, so that by the time I reached the car I could feel the fabric stuck to my back and my middle. The looser ones were so shapeless I felt like I had given up. And the rest were lovely in the store and then sweltering by ten in the morning. I would put one on, catch sight of myself in the bedroom mirror, and reach for something else. Usually a tunic over leggings, which in eighty five degree weather is its own kind of misery.

So I had more or less decided that summer, for a woman my age, simply meant feeling hot, sticky, and a little frumpy. That this was the deal.

I do not believe that anymore. The reason is a striped dress called the Lolita, from a small Florida boutique called Sanibel that I had never heard of until a neighbor of mine mentioned it over the fence one evening.

What it actually is

It is a breezy striped dress in a lightweight woven blend, cut in a soft A-line that gently flares instead of clinging. The stripes are vertical, in quiet neutral tones, the kind of thing you would see on a good linen tablecloth, not a beach towel. There is nothing loud about it. No slogan, no shiny trim, no print fighting for attention.

I want to spend a moment on what that A-line cut actually does, because I think a lot of women my age know exactly the problem I mean.

The fabric falls away from you instead of gripping you. It skims past the middle, past the hips, and lands softly without ever pulling tight across the places I have spent years tugging fabric loose from. It does not announce my shape and it does not hide me inside a tent either. It just lets me move.

And the fabric is light. Genuinely light. It is soft and breathable in a way that I did not fully believe until I wore it through a real Florida afternoon and came home still feeling like myself instead of feeling like I needed to peel it off.

Folded by the iced tea, ready for the hottest part of the day.

For the first time in years I stopped checking the thermometer before I got dressed.

Sarah called me

After about the second week my daughter Sarah, who is thirty eight and lives in Boston, called me on a Sunday.

She said, "Mom, every photo Emily has sent me this week, you are in the same striped dress and you look so relaxed. What is going on with you?"

I told her there was nothing going on with me except that I had finally found a dress I did not want to take off the second I came indoors.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked me where it had come from, and I told her, and she asked me which color, and I said I had started with the blue. She ordered her own before we hung up. She ordered the light pink.

"I have not heard you talk about a dress like this since before Dad retired," she said. "Send me the link."

→ Read about the Lolita

What changed across the summer

I had not gone looking for a favorite. I had just gotten tired of dreading the heat.

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

1. It stays cool. The lightweight fabric breathes through the worst of the afternoon. I have stood at the farmers market in full sun and at the side of the pool at my granddaughter Emily's swim lesson and stayed comfortable through both, which I could not have said about a single other dress in my closet.

2. It does not cling. The A-line falls away from me instead of grabbing. No sticking, no pulling, no standing in front of the store window discreetly unsticking the fabric from my back.

3. It does not announce itself. The quiet stripe and the soft shape mean I look dressed, not costumed. I have worn it to a doctor's appointment and to a long lunch with my sister, and in both places I felt put together rather than overheated.

It has become, without my ever deciding it, the dress I reach for first. On the hot mornings, which is most of them now, it is simply the obvious choice.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me from ordering. The Lolita for $65.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a breezy striped dress like this in the last few years.

• Boden striped dress, $130
• Talbots, $109
• Sanibel Lolita, $65.95

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 sitting on my back porch with a glass of iced tea, and you had asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that women our age have quietly been sold a false choice every summer, that we can either be cool and shapeless or pretty and miserable. The Lolita is the sensible, comfortable middle, and it has been a long time since I found one that genuinely keeps me cool without making me feel like I stopped trying.

I would tell you that the blue is the one I wear the most, that my sister says the light pink suits me best, and that the yellow is the one I bought because I had not let myself buy a cheerful color in years. I would tell you to buy two. If you buy two, the stack discount comes off, and if you are anything like me you will end up reaching for one of them every other day anyway.

I would tell you that the popular sizes are already showing as nearly gone. When I looked again this morning, the medium and large in blue were both flagged as low. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do, and the sizes go before the sale does.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been dreading a little the simple act of getting dressed on a hot morning, reaching past dress after dress because not one of them feels cool and comfortable and like you, please do not wait.

While the sizes are still in stock.

— Barbara