Goodbye Crop Top, Hello Aging: What We Can All Learn from Wendy Euler's Fun, Positive, Irreverent Approach
Before she launched ‘Goodbye Crop Top,’ the hugely popular pro-aging website with a subsequent Instagram page and hit podcast five years ago, Wendy Euler had been searching. There was nothing online or on social media shedding a positive light on women in her cohort—the 50-plus crowd. “I scoured,” she tells The Sunday Paper by phone. “I went everywhere—and I either found 30-somethings' pages, which weren't doing it for me, or everyone past 45 saying ‘life's over and you're old.’”
Euler, who spent 25 years in marketing and advertising, saw a “hole that needed to be filled.” She wondered, Where was all the good stuff about the privilege of growing older? Where was the positivity? Why isn’t anyone celebrating the gift of aging? “This is the best time,” she says about being over 50. “We're wiser and we've had more experience. We should be tapping into who we are.”
Armed with determination to “harness the power and positivity that comes with aging,” Euler began filling that hole. She launched her site, spotlighting fashion inspiration, lifestyle advice, and overall wisdom catered toward the second half of life. She called it ‘Goodbye Crop Top,’ a quirky metaphor for the things we let go of as we age and the other things we hold dear. “But I think women should wear and do whatever makes them feel best,” she stresses. “And sometimes I still wear crop tops!”
The feeling you get when you visit Goodbye Crop Top is that the best years are yet to come. Yes, life can get harder as we age, but we’re all the more capable of handling the hard stuff. And when we shed the ideals that no longer serve—the narratives, the expectations, the contrived perceptions around looking a certain way—we free space to embrace the good.
This is Euler’s mission. Of course, there are the haters to navigate. But practicing the art of looking within keeps her motivated. “The biggest advice I can give is never compare yourself to others,” she says. “Focus on yourself and what works for you. It's the only way to have a happy life."
She hopes that mantra trickles down to the younger generations. As much as she focuses on women 50 and older loving themselves, she wants her efforts to give women younger than her, including her children, “something to look forward to." And she also wants the term "anti-aging" to be a thing of the past. "I say do whatever makes you feel good—but I don't want to hold a bottle with 'anti-aging' on it.”
She continues, “I have three daughters, and by the time they come to this age, I want this sh*t to be gone.”
To learn more about Wendy Euler visit goodbyecroptop.com.
