Let’s get one thing clear up front: Wendy Euler wants you to wear a crop top if you want to wear a crop top. “If it genuinely makes you feel better, then do it,” she says.
Euler, who is 50, no longer wears crop tops except when she’s learning to surf, which she did earlier this year. Then she makes an exception to a rule she wrote for herself. You get to make your own rules, she says, “just always ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you are walking around [in a crop top] just to prove a point, that might be the wrong intention.”
A woman of both style and substance and the face of the blog Goodbye Crop Top, Euler is big on intention. She’s also big on kindness. And she likes to keep things simple. Her outfit of choice: ripped jeans, a plain white tee, and flip-flops.
The pursuit of simplicity is why she moved this summer with her husband and three daughters — ages 16, 13, 4 — to Bozeman, Montana. An advertising executive who built her career in San Francisco and Seattle, Euler says she was driving three to five hours a day, five days a week, mostly in the rain, when her husband decided to start a construction business in Montana. “I knew change would be tremendously hard for our kids and it would be difficult to say goodbye to friends, but I also knew fear of the unknown had to take a back seat on this one. I knew there was a less complicated, more peaceful life waiting for me, for us. There was no question we had to take the leap,” she wrote recently on her blog.
If you are a sour person, your style doesn’t mean a thing. It all ties together. You can have the greatest outfit on in the world, but if you are not fulfilled on the inside, it doesn’t mean much.
The transition has been challenging for her children, she says, but emotions have settled and she is back to work after a brief hiatus to focus on the people she loves. Euler launched Goodbye Crop Top on November 16, 2017, and today has 46,000 Instagram followers.
In the years prior, she was on a mission to launch a resort wear line. She had also started writing a lot. She says her interest in fashion led her to spend lots of time browsing the Instagram accounts of 30-somethings. “I recognized a big chasm for 40- and 50-somethings who want to say, ‘I am still very hip and cool. I am still really relevant.’ I just saw that big hole in the market, and I looked at my husband one morning and said, ‘I am going to fill it.’”
Through beautiful photography and thoughtful, well-written posts, Euler draws her readers in and encourages them to think about aging with style and grace. Spend some time with her and you will soon realize that she is more than a pretty face. “I don’t want to just sit here and look pretty,” she says. “It’s much deeper.”
Euler emphasizes that when she says she feels “very, very lucky” to be aging, that she sees aging as a privilege, she’s not just making noise. She means it. “I was in my 20s when my best friend died. I think of her every time I say that. I held her feet while she took her last breathe at 26, and I think anyone who gets to age — especially with good health — is winning.
Euler takes care of herself — mind, body, and soul. It means getting outside whenever possible and maintaining a daily exercise routine. (She likes spinning, yoga, and trail running of late.) It means eating well but not obsessively. (“If I want French fries on the weekend, I’ll eat them.”) And it means giving back to others. (Euler takes her girls to spend time with the elderly in assisted living homes; they hold hands with the residents, go on walks, and read and do crossword puzzles. “That fills me up,” she says.)
It also means living in positivity and gratitude. “If you are a sour person, your style doesn’t mean a thing,” she says. “It all ties together. You can have the greatest outfit on in the world, but if you are not fulfilled on the inside, it doesn’t mean much, especially in these middle years.”
At 50, Euler feels like life is only just beginning. Free from the insecurities of the decades that came before, by the time you are 50, you can just be, she says. You can just stand proudly in the woman you are, with intention and without apology or explanation.
“Own it,” she says. Crop top or no crop top. You get to decide.
For more from Wendy Euler, go to goodbyecroptop.com and follow @goodbyecroptop.
