I arrived at the five-star hotel in old undies thanks to Victoria’s hidden secret

Ihave often wondered why clothes manufacturers don’t carry on labelling their garments with the age they’re suitable for all the way from childhood to bewilderment. You know where you are with children’s clothes: even given the vagaries of growth spurts, nobody has ever mulled over buying a dress aged two to three for a 12-year-old.

But once you get into adult clothes, it all becomes very confusing. There is no label to tell you that the tiny mini dress you’re taking into the changing room is for age 18 to 24. Likewise, all those outfits that you find on the middle floors of department stores should be marked age 55-70, in order to prevent some unfortunate lamb dressing as mutton. If we just labelled all clothes with the appropriate age, a world of wardrobe malfunctions could be avoided and I certainly wouldn’t be right this minute huddled over in Victoria’s Secret using the torch on my phone to try to read what it says on the endless black drawers.

In my defence, we are spending the weekend in a five — five! — star hotel and all the intel I’ve acquired down the years about these situations (women’s magazines and the internet) suggests that new underwear is compulsory. So here I am crossing the door of the Grafton Street store of the world’s most successful lingerie retailer for the very first time, in high spirits — five! — and little knowing that the next hour will be one of the most stressful of my life.

I start with some basic reconnaissance of the ground floor in order to ascertain how shops work these days. Like those other American apparel stores, Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister, it is quite dark. I realise now this should have been as clear an indicator of age appropriateness as any clothes label, but for some reason — five! — I soldier on regardless. There are about three of every bra hanging on small bra hangers, which initially puzzles me, since there are about 500 different bra sizes in the world, but that’s when I spot the lines of drawers underneath, each of which is marked (in tiny writing) with a number and a letter. So say your bra size is 34C, then not only are you very lucky, but your new bra is awaiting you in that drawer.

I think I have shone my torch on every drawer on the ground floor — and there are hundreds — before I start to wonder if, of the aforementioned 500 bra sizes, Victoria’s Secret only carries 499 and that the missing one is mine. But along with that dawning suspicion comes another revelation: there are three more floors of bras and drawers in the shop. Up I go, then up I go again, spending at least 20 minutes in a neon pink room which, the internet will inform me several days later, is the shop’s teenage section. But again, my bra drawer is the lingerie equivalent of the lost city of El Dorado.

Through all of this, I have a vague sense that I appear to be the only customer in the shop who isn’t wearing a school uniform, but again — five! — I put that down to there being something wrong with all of them and not me. Then I run out of drawers and only then do I seek help. I am too embarrassed to reveal my bra size here but let’s just say that the part that should be hilariously big is hilariously small and vice versa. When I ask the extremely helpful assistant if they stock my size, I see her stifle a snigger and then, without even pretending to look something up, she tells me that they don’t. I try to palm it off as a joke and choose two bras I don’t like in sizes adjacent to my elusive one. In the changing room, the only thing I can clearly see is my cellulite. One of the bras does actually kind of fit though, if I push the fat bits of my sides down under the straps. But they never mentioned this in the women’s magazines or on the internet so I abandon the bra campaign completely and pick up a silky cream-coloured nightie instead. Then I leave the shop in a sweat and have a lengthy word with myself.

As to the five-star hotel, it’s just perfect. And the cream nightie turns out to be pink in natural daylight.

All of which could have been avoided if they just turned the lights on and put ages on their bras instead of letters and numbers to which deluded women like me can only aspire.