The 1980s Midnight-Blue Velvet Skirt And Jacket
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At the time the woman bought the midnight-blue velvet jacket and matching skirt, it was the smartest outfit she owned.
The jacket had six small buttons down the front.
She wore it with the top two undone, although that didn’t reveal anything.
The jacket had shoulder pads and fitted her snugly without clinging.
The skirt was full and fell to her mid-calf.
She found it in a boutique in the city and thought it would be perfect for her first day at her new job as a secretary in barristers chambers in the city.
Her father was a lawyer; so were her brothers.
She’d worked for them since leaving school.
No point her going to university, her father said, when she could earn a good quid working for him.
She wanted to tell him that she’d have liked to study law herself.
She’d helped her brothers study for their exams and always knew the answers to things before they did.
Case law was easy for her to remember. Ask her which case set a precedent for which tort and she could tell you. But she was never given the chance.
After a while she grew tired of doing all the work for her father and brothers, so she decided to leave and found a new job. Her mother told her she was breaking up the family. So be it, she said.
At that point she was thirty-six years of age.
She knew she was on the shelf – her friends told her so.
They were married with young children, and all said she should have married the young lawyer who had worked at her father’s practice for a couple of years.
He was keen on her and they’d gone out for a while.
But she wasn’t attracted to him, and the promise of a comfortable lifestyle in a nice house wasn’t enough for her to get past that, no matter what her friends told her about how marriage had to be a compromise.
Just because she was on the shelf, though, didn’t mean she couldn’t try her best. The midnight-blue suit was modest and feminine, but striking enough that it signified she cared about her appearance. She just hadn’t been allowed to express it before.
She paired it with dark-blue court shoes and donned a white frilly-necked blouse underneath the jacket – as she’d seen Diana, Princess of Wales do – and went off to her first day at the chambers in Phillip Street.
Right near the University of Sydney Law School, where she had hoped to study.
It was bittersweet, going to work there.
She wore the outfit once a fortnight for a while, rotating it with other outfits in her wardrobe. Then one day she decided she was sick of it and she retired it.
A couple of months after that, one of the barristers stopped by her desk.
Johnny, he was called. She didn’t think the barristers should have young-sounding nicknames when they had such serious jobs, but it suited him.
She knew from one of the paralegals who liked to gossip at morning tea that Johnny was in his mid-forties and had two sons in their teens.
His wife had died two years before, and Johnny had a housekeeper to help take care of the boys.
‘Where’s that lovely blue suit?’ he asked the secretary, startling her, because all he usually said was ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’.
‘It’s having a rest,’ she said, not interested in being challenged about her clothing choices.
He smiled at her, his eyes twinkling. ‘That’s a shame. I was fond of it.’
She shrugged. ‘Oh well. Maybe you should buy yourself a blue velvet tie to remember it by.’
The next week he came up to her wearing such a tie, looking proud of himself. She threw back her head and laughed, and he looked so pleased.
They were married eighteen months later. She loved becoming a stepmother, and was more surprised than anyone when she became pregnant with twins not long after the wedding.
After they were born, her entire wardrobe had to go. Her body was so different, and she couldn’t foresee it coming back to what it had been. Besides, with four children in the house they needed more space, so she pared back her clothes and gave some to charity.
She didn’t miss the midnight-blue jacket and skirt.
They had served their purpose and were falling out of fashion anyway.
As the calendar turned into the 1990s, full skirts and shoulder pads were out.
Still, she hoped some other woman might find a use for the suit.
Maybe she’d get lucky with it herself and find a kind man to love her.