Navel Window

L: Rita Rossweisse. R: Kyoko Sakura.

Everyone is familiar with the fanservice power of belly exposure, but sometimes a character's design goes to the opposite end of the spectrum. In these cases, their clothes feature a small opening that only exposes the navel and a bit of belly around it, as it is just enough skin showing to draw attention without being blatantly sexy and uses their navel as a sort of target to draw the viewer's eye. This can also be a way to indicate that a character has an edgy personality and likes to show off a little bit, or has some unique decoration in that area. A character with such an outfit may also be paired with or be part of a team or group with one or more characters wearing something that is more midriff-baring or more conservative altogether.

This usually is done either by an actual cutout in the character's outfit or a scalloped or notched hem in the character's top that combines with their pants/shorts/etc. to frame their navel. Their top may also be unfastened at the bottom so as to create the opening.

Sister Trope to Cleavage Window, which applies the same concept to a person's bosom. Compare with Navel Outline, where a character's navel is covered but still apparent through her clothing. Also compare Bare Midriffs Are Feminine, where the midsection is largely or fully exposed as an indicator of a character's femininity. To fit this trope, the opening should be around the same size as the examples in the page pic, or at least small enough that the character can mostly or completely cover it with one hand.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Blood Blockade Battlefront: Of the two female members of Libra, Chain's shirt and suitcoat are figure-hugging but otherwise unrevealing, while K.K. wears a short shirt and low-riding shorts covered by a long overcoat which is mostly unfastened and leaves her navel exposed.
• Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro: Nagatoro's "demon king" guise, which she appears to Senpai as in ch. 9 and which he imagines her as when she offers for him to sit with her and her friends in the school cafeteria, is a collared leotard with a devil tail and a heart-shaped cutout framing her navel. In the latter scene, this outfit is actually more modest than the devil getup Senpai imagines one of Nagatoro's friends wearing. The heart imagery also is a visual cue to Nagatoro's feelings toward Sempai.
• How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?: One of Satomi Tachibana's cosplay outfits is a skintight catsuit that sports a diamond-shaped hole exposing her navel, which left a tan mark that her students quickly took notice of.
• Little Witch Academia: Shiny Chariot's white jacket combines a roughly figure eight-shaped navel cutout and a plunging neckline, ostensibly to draw even more attention during her public performances.
• Maho Girls Pretty Cure!: Cure Miracle's Sapphire Style form has a flared notch in the upper garment which only exposes her navel, contrasted with Cure Magical whose Sapphire Style features a halter top with a sari-like extra garment over it.
• Naruto:
  • Karin's lab coat is cut out to show a portion of her stomach
  • The qipao-style dress Sakura wears in adulthood splits just high enough above her pants to leave her navel visible.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: At one point, Asuka wears a jumper-like outfit whose top has a notch in the hem that shows her navel. This isn't the first time she's worn anything revealing around Shinji, but in this instance, the reduced exposure fits with the mood of the scene, as she's asking Shinji if he's talked to Kaji lately and is dejected when he says he hasn't. This contrasts with an earlier conversation between them when Asuka is at her most confident and psychologically stable and is wearing a tube top and shorts.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Harley likes to wear an outfit which makes him resemble his Cacturne, which includes both a vest with Cacturne's pattern of diamond-shaped dark spots and a shirt with a diamond-shaped cutout around his navel.
  • Marian from Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl wears a long sleeveless top which splits in the front just below her breasts, creating a triangular opening that shows her navel.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
  • Sayaka Miki's Magical Girl outfit features a white corset with a gap around her navel, which exposes her soul gem.
  • Kyoko Sakura doesn't attend a school like Madoka and her friends and has a snarky, rough-and-tumble personality. In keeping with this, her casual clothes are short shorts and a jacket over what is likely some kind of belly shirt, as the jacket is unfastened at the bottom just enough to expose her navel.
  • Puella Magi Tart Magica: Corbeau features a cutout in her outfit around her navel that vaguely resembles the nib of a fountain pen.
• Yatterman: The 2008 remake ups the fanservice value of Hiroko Sasagawa's outfit by giving it a diamond-shaped opening showing her navel.

Comic Books

• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Althea, the physician to the Royal Family of Paradise Island, often wears a white mandarin collared sleeveless dress with a diamond shaped cut-out at the navel.

Films — Live-Action

• In the promotional image for Avenging Angel, Angel's Street Walker garb features a zip-up shirt with an angled hem that exposes her navel.
• One of Tamina's outfits from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time features this.

Music

• Vocaloid Megurine Luka has this in both her original and V4x designs. Both Kagamine Rin and Len (the latter a Rare Male Example) also have this in their Append designs. Another Rare Male Example would be Kaito, but mostly just in his default (and thus as close to canon as you can get) MikuMikuDance model. Most fanmade models and canon artwork of him depict him as wearing a shirt under his coat.

Video Games

• Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout: Ryza's shirt has a convenient cut on the lower half of her shirt that seems to have no purpose other than expose her navel. Even after becoming a full Alchemist and gaining a belt, the belt still doesn't cover her navel.
• Grimms Notes: The dress worn by Lira's Essence combines this with a Navel-Deep Neckline, as the small oval slit that shows her navel starts where the opening in front that shows off her cleavage ends.
• Honkai Impact 3rd:
  • Rita Rossweisse's Maid of Celestia outfit is an elaborately designed cheongsam which, among its many fanservice aspects, has a diamond-shaped cutout around her navel. With most versions of Rita, her default "waiting" pose is to stand with her hands resting crossed on her belly; in this outfit, this stance puts her hands directly over the cutout, almost as if she's trying to hide it.
  • Durandal has a number of midriff-baring outfits in both the game and its associated media, but in version 5.5, she gains two new outfits with only diamond-shaped navel cutouts, the battlesuit Palatinus Equinox and the alternate outfit Heavenward Dragon, an Asian dress like Rita's Maid of Celestia outfit. One animated short released for the 2022 Chinese New Year shows them buying the dresses from a shop while out on the town and wearing them during the evening's festivities.
  • While Raiden Mei has several revealing outfits, the only ones that actually expose her navel are her default as the Herscherr of Thunder and Orochi Cutlass, an alternate outfit for her Shadow Dash battlesuit which closely resembles the previous one. In both of these, said exposure is via a small diamond-shaped cutout with her navel just visible at the top corner.
  • Bronya Zaychik's default outfit as the Herscherr of Reason has a roughly diamond-shaped opening that, in her character sprite, shows the upper cleft of her navel but doesn't fully expose it, while artwork goes back and forth on whether it's covered or exposed.
  • The most fanservicey piece of the Beethoven Stigmata set features her lying on her back with her shirt partially untucked and unbuttoned just enough to show her navel.
• Pokémon has two inversions:
  • Elesa's outfit in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, which has her midriff bared except for a gray strip over her navel.
  • Wallace's outfit in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, which shows his midriff except for a diamond commected by two straps covering his navel. His midsection is less bared than Elesa's above.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens: Archers wear a white one-piece with a big hole for their stomach.
• Street Fighter V: Menat's story mode outfit, which is the least revealing of the three she has, still features a half-moon-like navel cutout.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses: The female version of Byleth ups the fanservice from the male version by creating such a gap via both an angled hem on her top and a notch in the top of her extremely short shorts.
• Kingdom Hearts II gives a few rare instances of a male version of this trope. Setzer and Riku both wear button or zip up undershirts with the bottom of the shirt undone, which flashes their navels.

Web Animation

• hololive: Many of the talents have default and alternate outfits which are anywhere from largely to fully midriff revealing, but Omaru Polka's raucously colorful circus dress only has a small opening that shows her navel.
• RWBY: Blake's outfit in Volumes 1-3 features this, but due to a software error her model doesn't have a visible belly button. After Volume 4 (and a change in animation software), her outfits trend toward a more traditional midriff-baring style, but flashbacks done with the new software featuring the old outfit now show her belly button.

Western Animation

• Futurama: Leela's swimsuits often feature cutouts over her navel. Her workout leotard in "Jurassic Bark" has further cutouts on the side to show off more of her stomach.
• Steven Universe: Rose Quartz most often wears a long white dress with a star-shaped window around her navel, which exposes her gem.
• Trollz: Zigzagged. Sapphire is the only only of the BFFL whose midriff is covered, but the few times her gem is revealed, her skirt hem is pushed down slightly to reveal her gem in-between the sashes of her sweater.

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