Baring your belly used to mean sucking in your tum and freezing your kidneys. But the new ‘kissing crop’ gives the look with none of the drawbacks
It started, as things often do these days, at the gym. Bare midriff mania, I mean. A few years ago I noticed that the women around me started showing up to classes in leggings and just a sports bra, or just a crop top. Just like that, the vests that used to go over the sports bra had … vanished.
Mysterious, I thought. I mean, it’s not as if it was high summer or anything. There was, to my knowledge, no national shortage of tank tops. Everything was the same, except that there was bare skin where the bottom half of a T-shirt usually goes. And this wasn’t just about the impulse to flex the flattest and most toned abdomens. What intrigued me was that these women wandering about naked round their middle weren’t sucking their tummies in, or covertly side-eyeing their reflection every two minutes. A midriff gap had begun to look almost normal.
Well, it most definitely is now; the top and bottom halves of an outfit are no longer required to meet. In fact, it’s considered much smarter if they don’t. What began in the changing room quickly took over the red carpet, where a naked midsection has become the modern cleavage, with Zendaya the Sophia Loren de nos jours. (Cleavage now being terribly 20th-century.)