The Joy of Wearing a Crop Top in Your 40s

Now do low-rise jeans. (Absolutely not.)

The other day, I was at Target (shocker), and I saw a pair of pants that intrigued me. They were a linen/rayon blend, beige with squiggly black brushstrokes all over them, high-rise and wide-legged and slightly cropped, with a half-elastic waist. They looked, dare I say, like a pair of pants that Rachel Comey would sell for $475, but here they were, at Target, for $30.

They seemed like the perfect summer pants. So I bought them. And then I came home and tried them on with a few different shirts and nothing looked quite right. I needed something a little more form-fitting on top than anything I owned, I thought. Then I noticed on the Target website that they had a matching shirt. But… it was cropped. Very cropped. Like not “slightly cropped”; this was fully-show-your-stomach cropped.

Also, I should mention at this juncture that this shirt is decidedly not my color. I am what the color type people call a “true winter”; i.e., I look best in jewel tones, stark white and black. As one website described it, a true winter’s colors are “sharp, cold, bright, powerful and crystalline. They completely lack ambiguity.” There’s no beige or mauve or taupe or even brown in this color palette; it’s all drama. This particular beige makes me look washed-out and wan.

The other thing is that I have never, ever worn crop tops. Well, there is one photo of me from when I was eight or nine and I’m wearing a matching crop top and skirt, but that’s it. I was not a crop top gal, ever, thanks to some pretty ingrained body dysmorphia and internalized fatphobia that I was so used to, I didn’t even give it a second thought. Crop tops were just not an option! I never thought about them as something I would put on my body, much less as a 46-year-old mom. So it was like my brain didn’t even process its existence, and I kept looking for a shirt that would look good with my new pants.