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 Florida boutique that quietly gave her another option.

I am 61 years old, and at my niece Caroline's wedding three summers ago, I spent the entire cocktail hour holding a flute 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 out of something so thin that I was already sweating through it before I left the dressing 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 sixty 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 flute, a small purse, a napkin, a man's elbow, or somebody's coat in such a way that my left upper arm was either entirely or partially hidden.

I called my husband Tom in from the porch 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 grocery store. I had crossed my arms in every group photograph at every birthday and every family dinner and every chamber of commerce event Tom and I had been to. I had taken off any clothing item with a short cap sleeve before going outside. I had bought three cardigans I did not actually need in colors I did not actually like, because they were the only way I could get through 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 in Boston.

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 department store. There is one sleeveless dress after another after another after another, in colors that look beautiful on the rack, 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 figure 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 in my walking group showed up at the trail head 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 too hot, which had been the obstacle that stopped me from 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 Florida boutique called Sanibel. I had not heard of it. She told me the blouse is called the Rhea. I went home and looked at it that afternoon.

The Rhea

It is a long sleeved striped blouse. The stripes are soft, the kind you would have called classic in a J Crew catalog twenty years ago. It comes in a soft blue, a khaki, and a quiet gray. It has a relaxed crew 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 real Florida afternoon. I have bought long sleeved tops for the summer half a dozen times in my life, and every single time I have, by the end of the first wearing, been on my knees by 11am, peeling them off in a parking lot somewhere. The Rhea is the first long sleeve top I have worn for an entire afternoon, in sun, in eighty four degree weather, and forgotten that it had sleeves.

I read about forty of the reviews before I ordered. 4.8 stars, 847 reviews, almost all of them women my age, and almost all of them saying the same things in different words. I have not worn a long sleeve to a summer event in twenty years. This is the first one.

→ Read about the Rhea

What happened in a month

I ordered two. The soft blue, because of Linda, and the khaki, because I have an olive skin tone and the gray would have washed me out.

The first one arrived in a small kraft paper parcel about a week later, with a handwritten note tucked inside from a woman named Eleanor, 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 in eighty three degree heat.

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 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 blouse, I was at a small chamber of commerce lunch in town, and Tom took a photograph of me without me 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 flute 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 porch with a glass of iced 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 closet 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 from the event. I would tell you that the soft blue is the one I have worn the most, that the khaki is the one Linda said suits me, and that the gray 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 almost sold out in mediums and larges the day I checked again this morning. The anniversary sale that the Rhea is part of is the lowest you will see on 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.

— Barbara