The Crop Top: Yes or No?

This very essential piece in teenage closets, the tight and short top can be seducing sometimes. The crop top, which appeared in the 1990s, is today an irreplaceable staple in teenagers’ wardrobes.

As these girls, spending much time online, they have been seeing the crop top in their favorite celebrities’ wardrobes over Instagram and Tiktok.

An issue has been detected among school girls, they refuse to wear their schools’ uniforms because they think it is out of style. One student posted on Tiktok a video of her in the courtyard of her school saying: “it's time to rebel girls. Get out your best crop tops, who cares about high school rules!”. For the journalist Alice Pfeiffer, specialist in the anthropology of fashion and gender studies, the idea that the crop top issue is becoming disturbing does not surprise her and she says:

“The belly is a sexualized area that has long been kept private by fashion, I see this resistance as a form of Puritanism which asks girls to cover themselves, implying that this naked flesh is indecent and must be covered".

Are mentalities struggling to change?

A Symbol of the "nineties"

From the 1990s, the crop top also made its way into the teenagers’ wardrobes and the Spice Girls, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and others made it popular. “Back then, the uniform was often baggy pants (that looks like a men’s pants), a bare stomach and then a so-called cropped T-shirt. A piece that can seem rebellious. The crop top, revealing the area between the breasts and the pubis, is automatically sexualized”, analyzes Alice Pfeiffer.

Over time, the piece will disappear from young women’s wardrobes, because it is deemed "vulgar”. But the ambiguity and the great wave of the unisex wardrobe almost made it a forgotten piece, until its rebirth a few years ago. On social networks, influencers wear it in all forms: sometimes with long sleeves, sometimes with thin straps, as it is often worn with high-waist jeans.

Alice Pfeiffer decrypts the trend: “As we can see, the 2000s are back in force. It is the return of hourglass silhouettes, the thong, which we see commonly between the youngest who are active on TikTok, and which brings a new meaning to this revival: a sexual liberation and a form of pro-sex empowerment”.

A Rebellion Generation

The crop top trend can also be a sign of this generation’s rebellion, breaking the norms of previous generations, intending to make itself heard and break taboos. "If young girls wear it, it is because it constitutes a form of self-assertion in 2020" notes the journalist from Inrocks. We can read there the answer to a much more androgynous fashion in recent years, a counterbalance to the gender neutral tendency which erases body differences between the genders. "

Now, bodies accept each other, show themselves, in line with the “Celebration of all body types and sized celebration” trend on social media. And men are not left out. In the 1980s and 1990s, Will Smith and Mark Wahlberg showed their navels by putting on crop tops. They've since put away the lap strap, but the men's crop top is also making a comeback. We find it on the Internet, (Justin Bieber, Bilal Hassani ...), and even in the schoolyard ...