I’ve been in conversation with my favourite clothing label. 
I was having an email conversation with Wall London the other day and they have pointed me at a couple of dresses from their new summer catalogue, which isn’t out for a couple of weeks yet. Check them out – the Jessica in both long and short, with interesting cut-outs at the neckline. These have my name written all over them.
The reason we were in touch was I’d received my first haul of clothes from the company on Thursday and worn the first of the new dresses – the ‘Pirouette’ dress in the red umber colourway – out to our monthly book club meeting.
This strong red is new for me – in the days when I had dyed black hair, I could wear scarlet, but since returning to my natural blonde, I normally stick to ‘spring’ shades like baby pink and baby blue. But both the colour and the dress itself garnered a lot of compliments, even from my normally immune husband, who said I looked ‘very elegant’.
I loved the actual wearing of the dress too: heavy, swirling, substantial jersey with a great drape, a comfortable and becoming cut, pockets (thank you Wall) and a draping cowl neck that not only flatters my substantial bustline (to my surprise – I always think of cowls as too bulky but this one is deep and fluid) but can also be worn as a hood, Valentina-style. This will be in my wardrobe until it falls to bits.
I logged back onto Wall to get it again in grey (a choice I’d only subsituted for the red at the last minute) but sadly it was no longer available, but I did buy the Lantern dress in black, along with a skirt (in teal) and cowl-neck top that I hope will go together to make an outfit.
Then I emailed the company and suggested a few ideas about their range: that it would be nice to see the Lantern and the Pirouette again next winter, in different shades; that the Issy dress would be great with sleeves for winter; that the cowl neck top might also work well as a longer tunic; that the pleat-front dress would also be nice in a longer length; that the gored dress – on me – was too wide at the neck and showed my bra straps so would be better with a v-neck, and that pockets on any dress are very welcome.
To my surprise, they emailed back to say thanks for the feedback and also for the coverage on this blog, and so we fell into a short exchange of emails whereby my ideas are being referred up to design level (and one or two, they’d already put into production, oddly enough, so we are clearly on the same wavelengh). Well ooh err.
It’s nice to get such responsiveness from a company and it also serves to remind that it’s a two-way street. Companies need feedback from us too, and the more that we do that, the better are our chances of actually getting the kind of goods that we want.