A letter from a reader

At 53, my sister held a tape measure against my arm in a changing room and showed me where every short sleeve I own stops.

You should picture me writing this at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold beside me, because that is exactly how slowly it has come. I am not a writer, and what another woman wears on her arms has never been any of my business.

But four women have asked me about this top in the last fortnight, two of them at the same table at book club, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with Carol, my sister, in a changing room at the shopping centre, where she had dragged me to help her find something for a wedding. I had tried on a top to be polite and taken it straight back off. She asked what was wrong with it and I said what I always say, which is that it does not suit me. She made me put it back on. Then she got the little tape measure out of her handbag, held it against my arm, and said it.

It suits you fine, Maggie. It stops two centimetres above the widest part of your arm. They all do.

I laughed, and then I stood there in that awful light and looked, and she was right. Not that top. All of them. Every short sleeve I had bought for about twenty years came to an end at almost exactly the same place, and that place was the one spot on my whole arm I would not have chosen.

I did not decide that short sleeves were not for me. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides that. It happens quietly, one changing room at a time, until you are a woman who says things do not suit her and has stopped asking why.

How it happens

When I actually went looking, I understood how I had ended up with a drawer full of tops I do not wear in daylight.

The shops give you two choices. There is the short sleeve, which is cut to a standard that has not changed since I was twenty, and it ends where it ends regardless of whose arm is in it. And there is the long sleeve, which is lovely, and which is unwearable here from about October.

Too short or too hot. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want a sleeve that goes a bit further and still lets her get through a Perth afternoon.

And once that is all there is, you stop expecting anything else. You buy the short-sleeved one because it is summer. You wear it once. You put a cardigan over it for the next five years, and you assume that is simply what arms are.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect I am not alone.

I thought my problem was my arms. Every time a top did not look right I decided something about me had changed, and I bought the next one a size bigger.

It turns out it was never about my arms at all.

It is about where the sleeve finishes. A sleeve that comes down past the widest part and keeps going stops drawing a line across you at the one point you were worrying about, and the whole arm reads as one line instead of two halves. The moment the sleeve is long enough, nothing else has to change.

It took me until 53, and my sister with a tape measure, to work that out.

The top is called the Marigold

It is from Perth Boutique, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. Carol found them, which she reminds me of regularly.

The top is called the Marigold, and they call it a comfort coverage tee, which is an unromantic name for something I now own in three colours. It is a plain round-neck tee with a relaxed shape and half sleeves that are longer than any half sleeve I have ever owned. Mine is the grey, and I will come back to the other two.

The sleeve length is the part that matters. It comes down past the widest part of the arm and finishes below it, so there is no line sitting exactly where you did not want one, and the arm simply reads as an arm. The shape through the body is relaxed rather than fitted, so it skims instead of settling, and it is light enough that the extra sleeve costs you nothing at all in the heat. The hem is longer than a tee usually is and curves down at the sides, so it sits below the hip and goes over jeans without riding up. That is the trick, and it is the only trick.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is a plain t-shirt with the sleeve in the right place.

What happened at book club

The first proper outing was book club on a Thursday night, which is about as exposed as my social life gets.

Three women asked me about it before anybody had mentioned the book. Jen started it, because she said I looked like I had been away somewhere.

The third was Lorraine, who I have known for twenty years and who has never once commented on anything I wear. She looked at me and asked if I had done something with my hair. I have not touched my hair. I have decided to take it as a compliment anyway.

What I noticed more than the questions, though, was that I did not do the thing with my arms. The thing where you fold them, or hold your glass with one hand across you, or sit slightly turned. I sat normally for two hours, which I had not realised I had been avoiding at every one of these for years until I stopped.

The next morning I put it straight back on to go to the shops, which is not something I would ever have done with a top I had worn out the night before. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. It was never the arm. It was the hem of the sleeve. Twenty years of deciding something about me had changed, and the thing that changed was a few centimetres of fabric. I would like those twenty years back.

Two. Longer does not mean hotter. It is light enough that I have worn it through an afternoon in the garden. The extra sleeve costs nothing, which is the part I did not believe until it arrived.

Three. A plain top is only plain if the fit is wrong. There is nothing on this thing. No print, no detail, no buttons. It is grey. And it is the first plain top in years I have been glad to be seen in.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Marigold is $45.95. It was $90.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because you can pay that for a plain tee in town and spend the next five years putting a cardigan over it.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no middleman taking a cut, and they have their end of season sale on at the moment, with free shipping Australia wide.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and had a proper look before I ordered. Seven colours — grey, white, blue, royal blue, pink, black and a yellow-green — and the sizes run from an AU 8/10 right up to an AU 18/20, all at the same price, which I notice, because for most of my life it has not been.

Then I ordered the white and the black as well, which Carol says was the only sensible thing I have done all year.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in the kitchen with the teapot between us and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have spent years saying that things do not suit you, and you have never once stopped to ask where exactly the sleeve was finishing, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a t-shirt will change your life. It will not. But there is something in sitting through a whole evening without folding your arms that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the free shipping goes with it. And it is the grey and the white that go first, which I found out because Carol had to wait a week for hers.

I have not said that something does not suit me since.

Maggie