Contrary to popular belief, the cropped top -or crop top was neither invented by the Spice Girls nor by a fast-fashion industry in need of profitability. To understand the origins of this oh-so-controversial garment, we must leave the contemporary Western world and turn to the stylistic heritage of Eastern countries.
Called “choli” when it designates the short top worn under the traditional Indian sari, it is also present under other names in most Asian countries but also the Middle East.
It was Badia Masabni, a dancer and owner of an Egyptian cabaret, who at the end of the 1880s appropriated the bedlah, a traditional costume made up of two pieces giving a generous glimpse of the navel of the wearer.
In 1893, belly dancers performed at the Universal Exhibition in Chicago, introducing the bedlah to the Western world and more generally the very concept of the crop top. In France, at the beginning of the 1930s, the illustrious designer Madeleine Vionnet also tried in vain to undress French women with an evening dress leaving the belly visible, without this either moving or seducing fashion lovers of yesteryear.
Ignored, or as if across the Atlantic, considered too “exotic” or even immodest, the crop top did not meet with great success… before being adopted again, almost, for the same reasons.
And for good reason, after the first stammerings in a post-war world rationed in textiles, it is the triumph of the pin-up and all the fantasies of which it is the object which comes to democratize the top-cropped.
Sported then in the form of a blouse tied above the navel and next to shorts, a skirt, or blue jeans, it is dubbed by youth in search of emancipation, lulled by the rhythms of rock’n’roll and the glamorous images of Hollywood in its golden age.
It is the image of Epinal by Marylin Monroe, Betty Page, or even Brigitte Bardot, which is also doubled in the United States by that of the vahine whose traditional attire, made of a skirt and a cropped top, is then largely sexualized.
Result? Fetishized, the little piece of fabric was not necessarily acclaimed by all of Puritan (and segregationist) America at the time, the police even going so far as to verbalize a young woman in a cropped top and shorts in the New York in the summer of 1945. Nothing helps: the belly and the chest are then considered as parts of the body that must remain hidden, kept away from prying eyes.