A Letter From a Reader: Long Sleeves After Sixty

I Stopped Showing My Upper Arms In Photographs The Year I Turned Fifty-Eight.

A note from a reader who spent four summers holding glasses in front of her arms, and the small British boutique that quietly gave her another option.

By Maggie Ellison • Shropshire, England

Posted 21 June 2026 • 7 min read

I am 62 years old, and at my niece Caroline's wedding three summers ago, I spent the entire drinks reception holding a glass of champagne in front of my left arm, in every single photograph anyone took of me.

I did it on purpose.

I was wearing a sleeveless navy dress that I had bought a week before the wedding, in a department store, after trying on every dress with a sleeve and discovering that not a single one fit me right. The sleeves were either short and elastic in a way that bit into the skin above my elbow, or they were three-quarter and made of something so thin that I was already too warm in them before I had left the fitting room.

So I had bought the sleeveless dress, and I had told myself, the way most women my age have told themselves at one point or another, that this was fine. I was fifty-nine at the time. Sleeveless dresses are perfectly acceptable. Plenty of women my age look beautiful sleeveless.

Plenty of women my age are not me.

When the wedding photographs came back from Caroline's photographer two weeks later, I went through them slowly on my laptop with a glass of wine. There were, by my count, thirty-eight photographs of me at the wedding. In thirty-four of them I was holding the champagne glass, a small handbag, a napkin, a man's elbow, or somebody's coat in such a way that my left upper arm was either entirely or partly hidden.

I called my husband Tom in from the garden and showed him.

“You did not,” he said.

“I did,” I told him.

What I had been doing for four years

I am going to tell you the truth, because I think a lot of women my age know exactly the truth I am about to tell you, and they are not saying it out loud either.

For the last four summers I had been quietly avoiding photographs. I had stopped wearing sleeveless tops to the shops. I had crossed my arms in every group photograph at every birthday and every family dinner and every summer do that Tom and I had been to. I had taken off any top with a short cap sleeve before going outside. I had bought three cardigans I did not actually need, in colours I did not actually like, because they were the only way I could get through a dinner with the in-laws.

The cardigan shelf I do not have to look at anymore.

And I had told no one. Not Tom, not my sister, not my daughter Sarah up in Leeds.

The thing about a woman's upper arm at sixty is that nobody warns us. There is no big public conversation about it. There is no aisle in the shop for it. There is one sleeveless top after another after another, in colours that look lovely on the rail, and they all assume that the woman buying them has the arms of a forty-year-old. Which I do not.

Nobody warns you about your upper arms after sixty. You just work out one summer that you have been hiding them, and you do not know exactly when it started.

Linda, in a striped blouse

A few weeks after the wedding photos came back, my friend Linda from my walking group turned up at the start of our walk in a softly striped blouse with long sleeves. Linda is seventy-one, sharp as a tack, and has worn the right thing to the right occasion for as long as I have known her. I noticed two things about her blouse immediately. One, that the sleeves did not look the least bit hot, which had been the very obstacle that stopped me buying anything with sleeves for twenty years. Two, that the blouse looked like she had put it on without thinking about it. It did not look like she had put on long sleeves to cover anything. It looked like she had put on a nice blouse for a Tuesday morning walk.

I asked her where it came from.

She told me about a small British boutique called Beatrice & Rose. I had not heard of it. She told me the blouse is called the Rhea. I went home and looked it up that afternoon.

The Rhea

It is a long-sleeved striped blouse. The stripes are soft, the classic kind you would have found in a good catalogue twenty years ago. It comes in a soft blue, a khaki, and a quiet grey. It has a relaxed neckline and an easy, lightly loose cut that flatters without billowing.

The fabric is the part that almost made me cry. It is soft, lightweight, and somehow does not feel hot on a properly warm afternoon. I have bought long-sleeved tops for the summer half a dozen times in my life, and every single time, by the end of the first wearing, I have been peeling them off in a car park somewhere by eleven in the morning. The Rhea is the first long-sleeved top I have worn for an entire afternoon, in the sun, on a genuinely warm day, and forgotten that it had sleeves.

I read about forty of the reviews before I ordered. 4.7 stars, more than 3,800 of them, almost all from women my age, and almost all saying the same things in different words.

“I have not worn long sleeves to a summer event in twenty years. This is the first one.”

What happened in a month

I ordered two. The soft blue, because of Linda, and the khaki, because I have a warm skin tone and the grey would have washed me out.

The first one arrived in a small paper parcel about a week later, with a handwritten note tucked inside from Beatrice, who runs the boutique. I put it on over a pair of white linen trousers and went to lunch with my sister, who is sixty-seven. She does not lie about clothes.

She said, “you look ten years younger.”

I told her I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse on one of the warmest days of the year.

She said, “I do not believe you. It looks light enough to be a t-shirt.”

I had it on for three hours that afternoon, in and out of the car, in and out of the heat, and I forgot about the sleeves entirely. The fabric did not stick. It did not pull. It did not feel like something I had to think about.

A month after I ordered the first blouse, I was at a lunch in the village, and Tom took a photograph of me without my noticing. I looked at it on his phone the next morning, and there were both of my arms, on either side of my body, exactly where they had always been.

Both of my arms. In a photograph. Without a champagne glass in front of them.

I had a little cry at the kitchen table. I am not a crying woman.

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat on my patio with a cup of tea, and you had asked me whether you should order one, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that there is, somewhere in your wardrobe right now, a cardigan you bought for the sole purpose of covering your arms at a dinner. I would tell you that you do not have to do that.

I would tell you that the Rhea is the first long-sleeved blouse I have owned in twenty years that I have not taken off the moment I got home. I would tell you that the soft blue is the one I have worn the most, that the khaki is the one Linda says suits me, and that the grey is the one a friend my sister's age told me she ordered three of.

I would tell you that the popular sizes are starting to thin out. The blue was nearly gone in the mediums and larges the morning I looked again. The anniversary sale the Rhea is part of is the lowest you will see it all year.

If you have been quietly hiding your arms in summer photographs for longer than you would like to admit, please do not wait. While the sizes are still in stock.

— Maggie

This is a personal account from a customer of Beatrice & Rose. Maggie was not paid to write it. She did receive the blouses she ordered.