A letter from a reader

I wore a cardigan through ten summers to hide my arms. At 64, a shopkeeper in Charleston took it right off me.

I have never written anything like this before, but the same question keeps coming up at book club, and I have run out of short ways to answer it.

I wore a cardigan through ten summers to hide my arms.

Not a pretty one, either. A beige one, and then a navy one when the beige gave out. I wore it to July cookouts and August weddings here in Virginia, where the air gets so thick you could wring it out. My husband Walt used to ask if I was cold. I would say something about the air conditioning, and after a few years he stopped asking.

This October my sister Carol and I took our trip to Charleston, the one we take every fall. On the second afternoon it was eighty-six degrees on King Street and I was in the cardigan, of course, with my tee sticking to my back underneath it. We ducked into a little shop mostly for the cool air.

The woman behind the counter watched me tug my sleeves down for about a minute. Then she came over with a soft blue shirt folded over her arm and said this to me, a perfect stranger:

Take that sweater off, honey. It isn't hiding a thing. It's wrapping you up like a parcel. Put this on over your tee and leave it open.

I nearly said no. Then Carol said, "Oh, for heaven's sake, Sue," and took the cardigan right out of my hands.

I put the shirt on and stood in front of the mirror, and two things happened. The first was that my arms were covered, exactly as much as I wanted them covered. The second took me a minute to put into words. I looked longer. Narrower through the middle. As though somebody had drawn me with a ruler.

Carol said, "You look taller." I am five foot four. I have not been taller since the eighth grade.

When I got home I opened the bottom drawer of my dresser and counted.

Eleven. Every one of them bought for the same reason, and not one of them bought because I liked it.

How a cardigan becomes a uniform

Somewhere in our fifties the upper arms change, and then the middle does, and nobody warns you how much you will think about it. So you reach for something to cover up, and the thing that is always within reach is a cardigan. It is soft. It is kind. It covers.

The trouble is what it does while it covers. A knit closes around you. It settles on the widest part of you and stays there. Button it and it pulls across the middle. Leave it open and the sides hang down like curtains. And in July, everybody in the room knows exactly why a woman is wearing a sweater.

A cardigan in July does not hide your arms. It announces them.

What I had wrong

I thought covering up meant more fabric, closer to me. It turns out it is the opposite.

The woman behind the counter turned out to be Margaret Rowe, whose family shop it is. She has been dressing women on King Street since 1998, and she explained it to me while Carol paid for an iced tea. Most women come in wanting to cover up, she said, and leave wearing something open.

"Closed makes you a box," she told me. "Open makes you a line."

Here is what she meant. When a shirt hangs open, its two front edges fall straight from your shoulders past your middle. That draws one long line down the center of you, and the eye follows it up and down instead of across. And a crinkled weave has its own body, so it falls away from your middle instead of settling on it the way a knit does.

The sleeves cover the part of my arm I mind, and they turn back at the wrist so I am not swallowed. I did not need to hide more. I needed to stop wrapping myself up.

Mine is the Wilhelmine

The shop is Wentworth & Rowe, a small family shop on King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, open since 1998. This is the first fall they have sold online, which I will come back to.

The blue shirt is called the Wilhelmine. It is a relaxed button-front shirt in a soft dusty blue, in a dry, crinkled weave with a matte surface. It has a small point collar, a row of small buttons I never do up, and it is cut easy through the shoulder and hip, so it never clings.

The crinkle is meant to be there. That is the part I like best, because it means a wrinkle has nowhere to show. Mine has never seen an iron, and it came out of my suitcase looking the way it went in.

They make it in every size from small to 5XL, which I mention because so many shops stop at a size that would never have fit me.

What happened when I got home

I came home and ordered three more colors from their new website: the charcoal, the clay pink and the khaki.

October in Virginia is the month nobody can dress for. The mornings are cool, the afternoons are warm, the stores are heated like greenhouses and the restaurants are still running the air conditioning like it is August. I used to solve all of that with a cardigan. Now I wear one of these open over a plain tee, and I am never too hot or too cold, and I never look like I am hiding.

At book club a friend asked what I had done differently. I told her I had lost a cardigan.

And Walt has not asked me if I am cold since we got back.

Three things I have learned since

One. Open, not closed. Two straight edges from shoulder to hip make one long line, and one long line is the most flattering thing you can put on a woman's middle. Buttoned up, the same shirt would do half as much.

Two. Covered is not the same as wrapped. You can cover your arms with something that stands away from you instead of clinging to you. The crinkled weave does that on its own.

Three. It asks nothing from you. A plain tee, jeans, and the shirt on top, open. No iron, no fuss, and it goes in a suitcase without a second thought.

One more thing, since the button on this page takes you to all of them: the Wilhelmine is one of eleven Classic Layers shirts Wentworth & Rowe make, the same easy shape in eleven colors. Mine is the first one you will see.

About the price

I want to be plain about this, because it was the part that surprised me.

The Wilhelmine is $59.95. It was $199.95.

My first thought was that something had to be wrong with it. Then I remembered I had already been wearing it for a week.

Here is the reason, as far as I can tell. Wentworth & Rowe has been a shop you had to walk into on King Street for twenty-eight years, and this is their first fall selling online. They are marking it with a sale, the way a shop does when it opens a new door. There is no catch that I have found.

I read the small print before I ordered the others, as I expect you are doing now. Shipping is free in the US, and you have thirty days to send it back if it is not what you hoped. That was enough for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If we were standing in that shop together, this is what I would tell you.

Go and open the drawer where your cardigans live. If there are more of them than you can count on one hand, and you bought every one of them to cover something, it is not because you have to hide. It is because nobody ever handed you something better.

Take the cardigan off. Put on something that stands away from you, and leave it open.

Two practical things. The First Fall sale is on now, and the most popular sizes go first. And there are eleven colors, so if the blue is not yours, one of the others will be.

Carol still has my old beige cardigan. She took it out of my hands in that shop and never gave it back. I have not asked for it.

Susan