It is often the case that, as summer rolls around and temperatures rise, so do hemlines. As men have embraced shorter shorts over the past few years, some have also started to wear shorter shirts — specifically, crop tops.
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.
David Mendoza, 29, an operations manager in New York, owns crop tops of varying lengths. Deciding which to wear, he said, often comes down to the occasion.
“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.
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.”
Mr. Mendoza started wearing crop tops about two years ago, he said, after noticing that some male fitness influencers he followed on Instagram wore them to exercise. “I was like, wow, they look really good, and it looks so normal,” he said.
But it was only recently, when Mr. Mendoza accidentally packed a crop top for a workout, that he wore one at a gym. “I was pretty self-conscious about it,” he said.
To boost his confidence, Mr. Mendoza posted a picture on Instagram that showed him wearing the shirt with the caption: “Let’s normalize crop tops in the gym.” Afterward, he said, “I started getting friends posting themselves in a crop top at the gym and tagging me.”
Ethan Garland, 25, a photographer and videographer in Chicago, said he has also gotten enthusiastic responses to his crop tops. Since he started wearing the shirts last year, he said, they have become “sort of like a uniform” for him.
Mr. Garland said he was drawn to crop tops because they make his legs look longer. As a man, he added, “if you’re willing to do something slightly past the norm, something past the bare minimum, people usually appreciate it and take notice of it.”
Some men say the attention crop tops attract can be unwanted. Joseph Damian, 22, a content creator in Fresno, Calif., said he started adding the shirts to his wardrobe about three years ago and that he has been wearing them in public for about a year and a half. “I’ve had people like look at me weird because I’m wearing one,” he said.
