Cropping Up

My BFF has deserted me. No, not my other The Portmanteau half, although she has jetted off to New York and left me home alone. But far more importantly, I have been abandoned by the Internet. Countless calls to Talk Talk and highfalutin tests like plugging the modem out and then back in again have led to the conclusion that the router is broken. It will be 5 days before a replacement is dispatched. What am I supposed to in the interim? Go to the corner shop and actually buy newspapers? Watch TV, mindlessly switching from one station to another in the hope that something good comes on? Call people on the telephone? I have discovered that if I crouch under the dressing table in my bedroom I can pick up somebody else’s wireless. It’s frustratingly temperamental and tends to drop out at the most crucial moments (for example, just as I enter my credit card details on Ryanair’s site) but it’s a far better solution than the alternatives listed above.

All of this crouching has rendered me cranky and so today I have decided to throw light on the most ridiculous trend of ’09 – the crop top. The crop top has been threatening a little comeback since the start of the year but I had decided to pay no attention to the issue because I thought it would go away if we all just ignored it. Six months later and I can’t step foot in Westfield (yes, I know I hate shopping centres but it’s really near my house and it has an excellent Waitrose) without a gaggle of crop topped teenagers getting in my way. I’m not sure what annoys me more about this trend – the fact that it looks pretty stupid or the fact that I’m too fat to pull it off. Last time crop tops were in, I had a flat tummy to rival Cheryl Cole but then everybody decided that showing your midriff was totally vulgar and I stopped skipping meals as only a fifteen-year-old can do. It’s really easy to go hungry when the hardest thing you have to do is watch MTV, but when you have to do adult things like deal with Talk Talk, it’s important to eat three square meals a day.

My biggest worry about the crop top revival isn’t that I will be forced into a bra top like that seen on Alexa in June’s Jalouse. Don’t fret, I’m not going to inflict that on anybody, but rather, I am concerned about what this means for tops in general, not just those specifically labelled crop. Cast your minds back to the year 2000 and remember where your average t-shirt ended. Yup, just right at your waistband. In recent years the hemlines of t-shirts and pretty much all tops have been lowered, meaning that you didn’t have to think about rolls of fat or greying knickers escaping from your jeans. It didn’t really matter if you put on a few pounds because your handy smock just covered everything up. But now with the rise of crop tops and shorter t-shirts in general, we are going to have to start paying attention to that area all over again. Hideous terms like muffin top and whale tail will re-enter our vocabulary and I'll have to try manage a few sit-ups. Great. LE