Real stories · The party dress with sleeves

Every little black dress assumes I still want bare arms — this one finally has sleeves

The party dress with sleeves — that's what this is. I'm 67, and somewhere along the way party dresses and I stopped agreeing about arms. Every little black dress on every rail is sleeveless, and I've spent years buying shrugs, wraps and bolero cardigans to fix a problem the dress shouldn't have had in the first place.

What I wanted was one dress that arrived with the sleeves already on it.

Then I found the Corvenya from a British label called York Boutique — a black A-line dress where the shoulders and sleeves are a fine floral lace, with a little keyhole at the neckline and pretty flared cuffs.

The lace is the clever bit. It covers the upper arms completely, but because it's sheer it still reads as dressy rather than cautious — which is why it looks like a choice, not a cover-up. The rest of the dress is properly opaque and cut in an A-line that skims everything from the waist down, and with black opaque tights and heels the shorter hem becomes a neat, leg-lengthening line rather than a dare. One dress, zero shrugs.

Fine floral lace covers the upper arms completely yet still reads as dressy — which is why it looks like a choice, not a cover-up. The A-line skims, the keyhole neckline flatters, and there's not a shrug in sight.

It was £29.95, half the usual £60 — less than I've spent on a single decent shrug, and I've bought a drawerful of those over the years to fix sleeveless dresses. A fortnight to send it back and free delivery, and that was that.

It has since done a birthday dinner and one theatre evening, and at the dinner my daughter asked to borrow it — a dress with lace sleeves, coveted by a woman of forty. I said no. It was £29.95 in the sale, half the usual £60.

If you also own a drawer of shrugs bought to fix sleeveless dresses, do have a look. The Corvenya is rated 4.6 out of 5 by more than 170 women, it comes in black, in UK sizes 8/10 to 16/18 — and at half price, party dresses vanish well before the party season does.