The New York Times published a style piece focused on men wearing “crop tops” made from old t-shirts or purchased from women’s clothing sections.
“Though men have been known to wear stomach-baring garments when they exercise or go to the beach, lately crop tops can be seen on guys at stores and bars. More modest styles hit right at a waistline, but many are cropped short enough to expose a navel. Some wearers are making theirs by taking scissors to old T-shirts; others buy them off the rack, often from stores’ women’s sections,” the New York Times style piece reads.
Parsons School of design’s dean of fashion Ben Barry told the outlet the style was briefly popular in the 1980s.
“In the 1980s, he noted, they were briefly ‘the epitome of American straight masculinity in football’ after many players started to rip their shirts to expose their stomachs,” the piece read.
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“No we most certainly are not,” CNBC’s senior Washington correspondent Eamon Javers wrote on Twitter, responding to the piece.
The Times interviewed an operations manager in New York named David Mendoza, who told the outlet that he owns multiple cropped shirts, varying in length.
“‘If I’m wearing one just to go out casually, the crop top will be mid- to long length,’ Mr. Mendoza said. If he is going out with friends, or if he wants a crop top to be the centerpiece of an outfit, he will choose one that shows a lot more skin,” the NYT piece said.
“Decline is a choice,” another wrote on Twitter in response to the Times’ headline.
Conservative commentator and radio host Dana Loesch wrote, “No man wears a crop top unironically.”
“At first, Mr. Mendoza would cut shirts himself. But as he started to wear more crop tops, he discovered that stores including H&M and Rainbow sold women’s styles with his preferred fit. Rainbow, he said, has ‘sexier, more open crop tops that are cut even shorter,’” the piece continued.
Another told the outlet that he started wearing cropped shirts because “they make his legs look longer.”
The outlet added that some received negative attention over wearing crop tops.
“I’ve had people like look at me weird because I’m wearing one,” Joseph Damian, from California, told the Times. “I feel like the way to actually rock a crop top is to just be confident.”