I stopped showing my upper arms in photographs the year I turned fifty eight.

A note from a reader who spent three summers holding a glass in front of her arms, and the small Australian label that quietly gave her another option.

By Robyn Whitfield · Wollongong, NSW

7 min read

I am 61 years old, and at my niece Caroline's wedding three summers ago, I spent the entire hour before the speeches 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 I had bought the week before at Myer, after trying on every dress with a sleeve and discovering that not one of them fitted me properly. The sleeves were either short and elasticised in a way that bit into the skin above my elbow, or they were three quarter and made of something so thin I was already sweating through it before I left the fitting room.

So I bought the sleeveless dress, and I told myself, the way most women my age have told themselves at one point or another, that this was fine. I was fifty eight 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 a fortnight 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 that wedding. In thirty four of them I was holding the champagne glass, a small handbag, a napkin, a man's elbow, or somebody's jacket in such a way that my left upper arm was either entirely or partly hidden.

I called my husband Ray in from the back deck and showed him.

“You did not,” he said.

“I did,” I told him.

What I had been doing for three years

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

For three summers I had been quietly avoiding photographs. I had stopped wearing sleeveless tops to the shops. I had folded my arms in every group photograph at every birthday and every family lunch. I had taken off anything 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 dinner with Ray's family.

And I had told no one. Not Ray, not my sister, not my daughter Sarah in Melbourne.

The cardigan shelf I do not have to look at any more.

The thing about a woman's upper arms at sixty is that nobody warns us. There is no public conversation about it. There is no aisle for it. There is one sleeveless top after another after another, in colours that look beautiful on the rack, and every one of them assumes the woman buying it has the arms of a forty year old. Which I do not.

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

Bev, in a striped blouse

A few weeks after the wedding photographs came back, my friend Bev from the walking group turned up at the car park in a softly striped blouse with long sleeves. Bev 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 that blouse immediately. One, that the sleeves did not look hot, which is the obstacle that had stopped me buying anything with sleeves for twenty years. Two, that it looked as though she had put it on without thinking about it. It did not look like she had put on long sleeves to cover something. 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 Australian label called Eleanor & Co. 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 kind you would have called classic in a Country Road catalogue twenty years ago. It comes in a soft blue, a khaki and a quiet grey. Relaxed crew neckline, an easy lightly loose cut that flatters without billowing.

The fabric is the part that almost made me cry. Soft, lightweight, and somehow not hot on a real Australian afternoon. I have bought long sleeved tops for summer half a dozen times in my life, and every single time I have been peeling them off in a car park by eleven in the morning. The Rhea is the first long sleeve I have worn for an entire afternoon, in the sun, at twenty nine degrees, and forgotten that it had sleeves.

I read about forty of the reviews before I ordered. 4.7 stars, 935 reviews, nearly all of them women my age, and nearly all of them saying the same thing 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 Bev, and the khaki, because I have an olive skin tone and the grey would have washed me out.

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

She said, “you look ten years younger.”

I told her I was wearing a long sleeved blouse in twenty nine degree heat.

She said, “I don't 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 air conditioning, 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 one, I was at a Rotary lunch in town and Ray 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, 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 cried a little at the kitchen table. I am not a crying woman.

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If you and I were on my back deck with a cup of tea and you 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 most, that the khaki is the one Bev says suits me, and that a friend of my sister's ordered the grey in three.

And I would tell you that it is worth having one hanging before the weather turns, rather than going looking for one in January when you actually need it.

If you have been quietly hiding your arms in summer photographs for longer than you would care to admit, you do not have to keep doing it.

— Robyn

This is a personal account from a customer of Eleanor & Co. Robyn was not paid to write it. She did receive the blouses she ordered.