A Letter From Beatrice · Founder of Beatrice & Rose

London · July 2026 · 7 min read

I Was Fifty-Three, Standing in a Changing Room, Quietly Undoing the Button on My Own Trousers So I Could Breathe. That Was the Day I Decided to Make These.

On the six things I insisted on for every pair of linen trousers in this collection, why nearly everything women my age are sold digs in, rides up or clings in the heat, and why the whole edit is reduced right now for our twentieth anniversary.

I am Beatrice. Before I tell you about the trousers, let me tell you about the changing room, because it is really where they began.

It was a warm afternoon two summers ago. I had carried a hopeful little pile of trousers into a cubicle with a curtain that never quite closes, the way they never do, and a light overhead that is somehow designed to be unkind to a woman of my age. And one after another they failed me in the same three ways.

The waistband cut a hard red line into my middle before I had even done up the button. The fabric, sold to me as a summer trouser, held the heat like a plastic bag the moment I moved. And when I turned to face the mirror, the thing gripped the one part of me I would most like it to have left alone, and held on.

I stood there, fifty-three years old, and I did the small quiet thing I expect you have done too. I undid the button so I could take a proper breath. And I felt something I think a great many women feel and almost never say out loud. Not sadness exactly. More a kind of tiredness. The tiredness of being asked, season after season after season, to fold a body that had carried me through an entire life into clothes cut for a body I stopped having twenty years ago.

For the longest time, I told myself it was me. That if I were only a little smaller, a little firmer, a little more like the girl on the swing ticket, the trousers would sit the way they were meant to. I want to say this to you as plainly as I can, because I wish somebody had said it to me sooner. It was never you. It was the trousers. They were designed for someone who does not exist, and then quietly sold to the rest of us.

I went home that evening and I did not have a cry, if I am honest. I got cross instead. And when I get cross, I tend to get to work.

Because here is the truth of it, and you already know it. The summer trousers made for women our age fall into two rather sad little piles. The first pile looks smart on the hanger and turns into a sauna the moment the sun finds you, clinging and sticking and showing every single thing you would rather it did not. The second pile is comfortable, yes, but it is the shapeless, elasticated, apologetic sort that seems designed to help a woman over fifty disappear altogether. Frumpy. Forgettable. The kind of trouser that whispers, ever so gently, that you have stopped trying.

I have never once accepted that a woman my age should have to choose between the two. Between being cool and being seen. Between being comfortable and feeling, when she catches herself in a shop window, like herself.

So I made a third pile. It took me the better part of a year, a great deal of tea, and rather more arguing with my supplier than I had bargained for. This is the Summer Trouser Edit, cut almost entirely from real breathable linen and cotton linen, and I insisted on six things across every single pair. Nearly every one of those six things cost more to do properly. I paid for them anyway, because I have worn the cheaper version, and I remember exactly how it made me feel.

1. A waistband that does not dig in. Not once, and not by lunchtime.

This is the one I care about most, because it is the one that undid me in that changing room. Every pair has a soft, wide, covered waistband that moves with you through the day, as we all move through the day, and as our middles do too. It rests gently on you instead of biting into you. There is no hard button pressing a mark into your stomach, no seam sawing away at you on a long car journey, no quiet undoing of anything after a proper lunch. You put them on in the morning and you simply forget about them, which, when you think about it, is the entire point of a good pair of trousers.

★★★★★“For the first time in years I got to the end of the day without a red groove pressed into my stomach. I nearly wrote to say thank you, and then I did.”Carol R., Harrogate

2. Real breathable linen, so the heat has somewhere to go.

Not a blend pretending to be linen, and never the synthetic they call a summer trouser and then stand back and watch you swelter in. The real thing, woven loosely enough to let the air move right through it, so the backs of your legs do not stick to the kitchen chair and you are not damp and uncomfortable by the time you have walked from the car to the shops. It keeps you cool when the heat sits heavy and refuses to lift, and it softens like a well loved cotton sheet the more you wash it, so it is kinder to you in August than it was in June. I would not let a single pair into this collection until I had worn it myself on the hottest day I could find.

★★★★★“I wore them on the hottest day of the year to my grandson’s sports day and stayed cool the whole afternoon. My old trousers would have had me melting on the touchline.”Pauline L., York

3. A cut that skims the middle, and never clings to it.

I will say the quiet part out loud, because you and I are the same and there is no shame in any of it. Our bodies change. The middle is where a great many of us carry it now, and most trousers seem almost determined to point straight at it and hold on. Mine were made to do the opposite. They fall softly and straight from the waist and skim gently over the part you are self conscious about, with room for the air to move underneath, so you feel covered and easy and comfortable rather than gripped and on display. Every single pair was fitted on a real woman, with a real figure and a real life, before I would put my name to it. Never a mannequin, and never a girl of twenty-two standing very still.

★★★★★“They skim straight over the tummy I have hidden for years instead of hugging it. I caught myself in a shop window and, for once, I rather liked what I saw.”Linda K., Norwich

4. An easy, relaxed leg that moves the moment you do.

Wide enough to feel like a breath of air on a hot day, and tailored enough that you never once look as though you have surrendered to elastic and comfort and nothing else. A leg you can kneel down in the garden in, walk the dog in, chase a grandchild across the grass in, and still feel perfectly and properly dressed to meet a friend for lunch afterwards, without having to go home to change first. Comfortable and put together were never meant to be opposites, whatever the shops have spent our whole lives trying to tell us.

★★★★★“Comfortable enough for the allotment, smart enough that I wore the very same pair to a lunch straight afterwards. I have bought three colours since.”Diane M., Bath

5. Sizes from a UK 8 to a 24, in every single pair.

Not the small ones only, with the larger sizes quietly missing from the nicest colours, the way it so often goes. If it is in this collection, it comes in the full range, cut to sit right whether you are five foot two or five foot nine, whether you are a neat little eight or a proud and comfortable twenty-two. I have stood on the wrong side of that changing room curtain myself, taking home whatever they happened to have left in my size rather than the colour I had actually fallen for. I decided a long time ago that I was not going to do that to you.

★★★★★“I am a 22 and I could actually choose the colour I loved instead of the one that happened to be left on the rail. You have no idea what that means to a woman my size.”Janet S., Chester

6. Colours chosen to go with everything you already own.

Soft neutrals and gentle summer colours, each one picked to sit beside the linen tops I made last year and beside whatever is already hanging in your wardrobe this morning. So one pair does not stay one pair for very long. It quietly becomes the trousers you reach for all summer, with the white shirt, with the navy top, with the sandals you already have by the door. That is how a single good pair of trousers turns, almost without your noticing, into a whole summer of getting dressed without a second thought.

★★★★★“I started with the stone and went straight back for the sage and the navy. They go with every top I own, and with each other.”Maureen T., Exeter

The letters that told me I was not the only one

When I made a single linen top last year, I did not expect what came back. Women wrote to me. Hundreds of them, and then thousands. Not about the price, and not about the delivery. They wrote to tell me small, private things they had never told a clothes shop before. That they had stopped buying summer trousers altogether. That they dreaded the hot months because nothing fit the way it used to. That they had a drawer of trousers they could not bear to wear and could not quite bring themselves to give away.

I read a great many of those letters sitting on the floor of my little studio, the way I used to sit when my daughter Rose was small and the orders were stacked around me. And one line, from a woman in her sixties, has stayed with me ever since. She wrote that she had forgotten what it felt like to get dressed in the morning and simply not think about it again all day. That she wanted, just once more, to feel comfortable in her own clothes and in her own skin at the same time.

That is who I made these trousers for. Her, and you, and the woman I was in that changing room. Because there are only so many summers, and I would like the ones I have left to be spent in something I actually feel like myself in. I would very much like that for you too.

The Summer Trouser Edit, against the summer trousers you have been buying

You can find a pair of summer trousers for sixty pounds almost anywhere. I know, because before I made these I bought a great many of them, standing in that same unkind sort of changing room, hoping every time that this would be the pair that did not let me down by three in the afternoon. Here is the difference, laid out plainly.

Why the whole collection is reduced now

This year Beatrice & Rose turns twenty. To mark it, I have reduced the whole Summer Trouser Edit while our anniversary lasts. Every pair is from £39.95, down from £99.88, and the discount stacks a little further if you take more than one, because good trousers were always meant to be lived in by the pairful, in a colour for each sort of day, and not bought one nervous pair at a time.

I will be honest with you about the stock, because I would want you to be honest with me. Each style is limited, and once a size in a colour has gone from this run, both the real linen and the anniversary price go with it. The middle sizes always go first. They always, always do.

My granddaughter will not remember this summer. But I will. I will remember making these with her asleep on my shoulder, arguing over waistbands with one hand and rocking her with the other. And I would like to think that somewhere, a woman standing in front of a mirror in a pair of them feels a little more like herself than she did in the last thing she tried on. That is the whole of it, really. That is why I made them.

With all my love and gratitude,
Beatrice
Founder & Designer, Beatrice & Rose London, with my daughter Rose

This is a personal letter from the founder of Beatrice & Rose. Prices and availability are accurate while stock lasts.