A letter from a reader

At 57, my friend watched me pack three pairs of long trousers for a week up north. She asked what I thought the weather was going to do.

You should picture me writing this out on the back verandah with the fan going, because that is where I have done most of my thinking lately. I am not a writer, and what another woman chooses to wear on her holidays has never been any of my business.

But three different women asked me about this set in one week away, two of them at the same breakfast table, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

It started with Bev, in my bedroom, a fortnight before we flew. She had come to drop off a book and found the case open on the bed with three pairs of long trousers folded into it, and a fourth pair of linen ones already on the top. She looked at the case. She looked at me. Then she said it.

Maggie, it is thirty-four degrees up there in the shade. What exactly do you think is going to happen to your legs?

I laughed, and then I looked at the case, and she was right. Four pairs of long trousers for a week in the north. And it was not that I had forgotten to pack shorts. It was that I did not own any. I worked it out standing there, in front of her. Nine years.

I did not decide to give up shorts. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody announces it. It happens quietly, one summer at a time, until one day a friend is standing in your bedroom doing the arithmetic out loud.

How it happens

When I actually went looking, I understood how I had ended up with a drawer that stops at the ankle.

The shops give you two choices. There are the little ones, cut for a twenty-two year old and finishing a good way above the knee, which I have not worn since the children were at school. And there are the ones they make for women our age, which are either enormous and elasticated in a way that announces itself from across a room, or they are simply cropped trousers wearing a different name.

Too short or hiding. That was the whole shopping centre. Nobody seemed to think a woman might want a pair of shorts that are actually long enough and still look like she chose them.

And once that is all there is, you stop looking. You buy another pair of linen trousers. You wear them in thirty-four degrees. And you assume that is simply what happens after fifty.

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 legs. Every summer I looked at a pair of shorts, thought no, and bought something long instead.

It turns out it was never about my legs.

It is about the length, and about what comes with them. A short that comes down far enough to sit near the knee stops being a decision you have to make about your body, and a matching top over it means you are wearing an outfit rather than a pair of shorts. The moment both of those are true you put them on the way you would put on a dress, without a conversation in the mirror first.

It took me until 57, and a friend counting trousers in my bedroom, to work that out.

The set is called the Bellerose

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

The set is called the Bellerose. Two pieces: a relaxed camp-collar shirt and a pull-on short with an elastic waist, in a light pale blue weave with a little red crab print through it and blue and white striped trim at the collar, the cuffs and the hems. They arrive together and they are cut for each other.

The weave is the part that matters. It is light and it moves, so it does not cling walking back up from the water and it does not hold the heat. The shirt has a camp collar, which sits open and flat and does not want a thing underneath it. The waist is elastic, which I would normally hold against a garment and here I do not, because it is pull-on and there is nothing to do up with wet hands. And the short is long enough. That is the whole argument.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just two things made for a hot week by somebody who has had one.

What happened on the second morning

The first proper outing was breakfast on the second morning, outside, already warm at half past seven.

Three women asked me about it before I had finished my coffee. The woman at the next table started it, because her daughter had been looking for something like it and could not find it.

The third was Bev, who had already seen it twice and said nothing at all for two days, and then on the Wednesday said I looked about ten years younger in it. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I stopped going back to the room. I did not change before lunch. I did not change before the walk. I wore the same two pieces from breakfast through to a drink at six, which I had not realised I had been unable to do for years until I did it.

The next morning I put the shirt on over my swimmers and walked straight down in it. Half buttoned, nothing underneath, no cover-up to carry and nothing to leave behind on a chair. Completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. The length does the work, not the leg. Far enough down and you stop thinking about it entirely, which is all I have ever wanted from a pair of shorts.

Two. Two pieces beat one. The shirt went over everything else I packed, and the shorts went with a plain singlet twice, so it is a set and it is also two more outfits.

Three. It came home with me. I thought it was a holiday thing. It has been to the shops, to my grandson’s swimming and out the back for lunch on a Sunday, and it has looked right at every one of them.

About the price

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

The Bellerose is $112.95 for both pieces. It was $280.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because you can pay that for one pair of linen trousers in town and get nothing to wear with them.

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 spring and anniversary sale on at the moment, which is sixty per cent off, free shipping Australia wide, and a little more off again if you take two or more.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and had a proper look before I ordered. Twenty-four sets in the collection, all two pieces, all the same price, and the sizes run from an XS right up to a 5XL without the price moving, which I notice, because for most of my life it has.

Then I ordered a second one for the Christmas week, which Bev says was entirely predictable. She is not wrong.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat out the back with a cold drink between us and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If there is something you quietly stopped wearing, not because anybody said anything but because one summer you did not buy any and then you never did again, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a pair of shorts will change your life. They will not. But there is something in walking down to the water in the middle of the day with no plan for covering up, and I had quietly given that up, and I would rather you did not give it up too.

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

I have not packed four pairs of long trousers for a hot week since.

Maggie