Opinion: I'm 36 — when do I have to give up crop tops?

Having recently turned 36, CNN Style producer Jacqui Palumbo asks readers if she is too old to still be wearing a crop top.

Editor's Note: Jacqui Palumbo is a Producer for CNN Style based in Chicago and New York. The views expressed here are her own. 

As a pre-teen in Y2K, the (small) shadows of crop tops loomed large. They were an inescapable fixture of red carpets and pop culture: Keira Knightley paired them with impossibly low-slung pants and Aaliyah with Tommy Hilfiger boxer-briefs, while the cast of “Buffy” battled vampires in short sweaters and tanks.

In a decade when unforgiving low-rise jeans were the norm — and criticism over women’s bodies perfunctory — crop tops were not casual, easy wear; any softness of the torso was considered an aberration. I came of age on celebrity magazines and early gossip blogs that trained my eye to notice even the smallest deviations from thinness. You had to earn your stomach before showing it off.

Because of this, what should have been my halcyon midriff-baring years were not: I spent my teens and twenties both underweight and insecure, in a silent war with my midsection. It has never been firm, but curved, both from a protruding ribcage and a soft belly that may fluctuate but never flatten. By college, I was checking myself in every passing reflection, and strapped wide belts around American Apparel dresses as makeshift shapewear. I also believed that my window to wear more skin-baring styles was limited — after all, women’s desirability abruptly ends in our thirties, right? I felt as if I was quickly running out of time.

Like many women who return to old images of themselves, the body dysmorphia has cleared in hindsight. Why did I spend so much energy berating myself at my skinniest?

Now that I’m 36, crop tops have become an unlikely staple in my wardrobe, and I’m reluctant to let them go. I wear them casually for dinner dates, dress them up for nights out, and even have longer cuts with high-rise pants that I get away with at work. I find comfort and confidence in wearing something regularly that younger me would have balked at, as it's a small rebellion to reset the part of my brain that compulsively checks my stomach.

Cropped shirts began making my way into my wardrobe at 31, after several major upheavals caused me to rebuild my life in the way that I saw fit. They are emblematic of my greater sense of self-worth — a feeling I’ve noticed among my friends, too, as we emerged from our twenties with a more solid sense of ourselves.