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Crop tops (also cropped tops) are T-shirts or blouses that are cut off, resulting in the exposure of some of the wearer's abdomen.[1] The halfshirt (or bellyshirt) is a variety of shirt that is cut off from the bottom of the chest.
Though several cultures around the world have featured midriff-baring tops for centuries, the style became a temporary men's fad in the United States in the 1980s. Originally based on American football jerseys which were cropped above the navel to make them cooler in hot weather, it became popular to cut t-shirts above the midriff for daily wear. The concept was wrought upon a not unsubstantial amount of athletic and aerodynamics logic: in many athletic activities, including running, basketball, football, etc., there exists a need for both speed and temperature control. To use the example of a jogger, in an instance in which being shirtless may not be appropriate, the wearing of a half shirt allows the athlete to expose more surface skin area (aiding in body cooling and aerodynamics) while still fulfilling the incidental need to wear a top-concealing garment. This was the philosophy behind the extension of the wearing of half shirts on the football field to other athletic arenas. One important early proponent of the design of commercially-available half shirts for this purpose was New Balance, who manufactured belly tops for male and female athletes in the 1980s.
Several major apparel companies released lines of ready-made bellyshirts in the 1980s, including Nike, Inc., Adidas and others. As an even further extension of the fashion into the public sector, it became common to see bellyshirts casually worn at school and in other semi-formal public places. Many of these shirts were quite short, between 15-17 inches in length, causing a large area of a man's belly and bellybutton to be exposed. Some schools and similar public institutions prohibited the wearing of half shirts outside of physical education classes, as some areas of the United States consider baring of the midriff and bellybutton to be immodest. It thus became a semi-common convention to see school rulebooks include a prohibition of the showing of the male or female navel, or even the bare midriff, as a means of regulating the half shirt.
Bellyshirts became scarce in the United States by the end of the 1980s and were virtually gone by the early years of the following decade. In the mid-1990s, bellyshirts saw a resurgence as a popular top, this time for women, and often much shorter than the late male version. These shirts have remained popular into the 2000s. Extremely short crop tops may reveal the underside of a woman's breasts. Many American (and other) women could be seen wearing small crop top shirts particularly at evening entertainment occasions in the early 2000s, a trend which is said by some to indicate a continued interest among Americans in the viewing of the bellybutton. The shirts can therefore be said to have undergone a transformation from an athletically-functional shirt to one with the intention of eliciting sex appeal or interest between the sexes. In more recent fashion fads "bunching" has developed. An already short cropped top can be bunched upward to expose more mid-section and then tucked below the bust line. Likewise the waistband of the shorts, jeans, or skirt is then also rolled down. Bunching has been gaining popularity in the NW and SW United States.
Other common names for these shirts have included: belly shirt, half shirt, halfshirt, crop top, tummy top, short shirt, cutoff shirt.
Several famous entertainers have become renowned for wearing bellyshirts, such as Madonna, Britney Spears, Shania Twain, and Gwen Stefani. Bellyshirts, or halfshirts, are also popular among professional sports figures for their comfort under rigorous athletic conditions, most notably Jim Edmonds of the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team.
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References
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- This page was last modified on 23 September 2008, at 18:41.
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