A letter from our founder

I Spent Forty Years Dressing So Nobody Would Look at Me

I didn't realise I was doing it. That's the strange part.

If you'd asked me, I'd have said I dressed tastefully. Sensibly. Like a woman who had her life in order. Beige, grey, navy. Plain blouses buttoned to the top. Nothing that turned a head.

But one afternoon last spring, my daughter Charlotte was helping me clear out my wardrobe, and she stopped, holding two things up, one in each hand. Both grey. She looked at the rail behind her, then back at me, and she said, "Mum, where did all the colour go?"

I didn't have an answer. And that question has followed me ever since.

See where it led

Because when I really looked, I saw it. Forty years of choosing the thing that asked for nothing. Forty years of making myself easy to overlook, and calling it good taste.

I grew up being useful. That was the word for women like me. You got on with things, you held everyone together, and you didn't make a fuss. I raised my family that way. And somewhere in all that holding together, I quietly disappeared. I'd decided, without ever quite saying it out loud, that being noticed belonged to other women. Younger women. Not me. Not anymore.

So I did something about it. Charlotte and I started pulling together the pieces I'd spent decades telling myself I couldn't wear. Print. Real colour. Blouses with flowers spilling down the front.

The first time I put one on, I looked in the mirror and saw myself. Not the useful one. Not the sensible one. Me. I felt alive, and honestly, a little furious that I'd handed away so many years to a rule nobody had even asked me to follow.

That's when we decided to open the shop.

Not everyone approves. A woman messaged me last week to tell me I was an embarrassment. Seventy-one, she said, and no business dressing in colour or standing in front of a camera. She wasn't the first, and she won't be the last. It stings, every time, and I've stopped pretending otherwise.

But I'm not fading back into beige to make a stranger comfortable. Not now that I know what the other side feels like.

Every blouse we choose has to pass the same simple test. Would we wear it, and would we feel like ourselves in it? If it earns a second look in the mirror, it earns its place.

Explore the blouse collection

If you've ever reached past the bright thing for the plain one, because somewhere along the way you decided being seen wasn't for you anymore, hear this from a woman older than you who's done disappearing.

Print isn't a spectacle. Colour isn't too much. It was never true. It was never you.

Wear the blouse.

Warm wishes,
Elaine
Elaine Hart London