The Summer of Male Shorts Anxiety

The quad gods of Thom Browne.
Photo: Alena Zakirova/Getty Images

All summer, men have been fretting over whether or not they can wear shorts. I never wear shorts to work (the AC is too cold, for starters) and rarely wear them outside the beach at all. Then came Paris Fashion Week, when the historic heat wave turned the shorts-versus-pants debate into a matter of survival. When the temperature approached triple digits, I gave in and ditched my suits and jeans for a pair of silky blue nylon short-shorts that I had packed for the gym. I would have gotten fewer stares and comments if I had worn a Rick Owens gimp suit. At one point, while waiting for a runway show to start in the blazing sun, a fellow editor turned to me and said that I was “brave.” He was sweating it out in trousers.

It’s been a long time since Tom Ford infamously argued “a man should never wear shorts in the city.” These days, there is little agreement on the ground rules, if there are still rules at all. After a recent Bloomberg poll found that 45 percent of the company’s clients are at least open to the idea of shorts in the workplace, a New York Times op-ed held the line for dress codes. In Tokyo, the government’s “Cool Biz” initiative rubber-stamped shorts for the sake of saving energy during steamy summers, which inspired the New York Post to declare a “global controversy.” Take a stroll anywhere in the city at dinnertime and men in shorts are everywhere, and everyone — men included — seem to be mad about it. Earlier this week, a Bar Oliver server told me a no-shorts policy had been recently implemented for staff.

It has been an ungodly hot summer, but the shorts trend isn’t all about comfort. Some men seem to simply like the attention. “There’s something happening with men and their legs right now, and I don’t think it’s just the heat,” says Gauthier Borsarello, the creative director and co-founder of L’Étiquette magazine. Borsarello clocks the influence of celebrities such as Harry Styles and Paul Mescal, who are regularly photographed displaying the “confident, slightly retro masculinity” of skimpy running shorts.

From left:Harry Styles Photo: XNY/Star Max/GC ImagesPaul Mescal Photo: Victor Boyko/Getty Images for Gucci
From top:Harry Styles Photo: XNY/Star Max/GC ImagesPaul Mescal Photo: Victor Boyko/Getty Images for Gucci

Anyone who has spent time on menswear Substack could have seen this coming. There’s a photograph from 1982 of Harrison Ford wearing a navy sweatshirt and daringly tiny shorts in Cannes that goes viral every summer. When asked about the outfit a couple of years ago, Ford joked, “I’ve grown out of it.” But some of us grew up idolizing Blade Runner–era Ford and his sense of understated cool.

Harrison Ford in 1982.
Photo: URLI/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

The shorts discourse is playing out as men are becoming more sophisticated in how they wield their sex appeal. “They’re paying more attention to themselves overall, how they’re perceived, how they curate a silhouette, and thighs have quietly become part of that conversation,” Borsarello says. “It’s a part of the body you can choose to reveal, deliberately, for a season, and a shorter short in summer does exactly that.”

The designer Aaron Levine says that at his namesake brand, trousers and denim still outsell shorts 50 to one. But he gets the appeal of clocking in with calves out. “Look at Juergen Teller in his little pink running shorts,” says Levine, referring to the German photographer known for wearing custom Phoebe Philo–designed shorts. “The goal is to create your own reality to a point where you can do whatever you want. That’s the ultimate luxury.”

Still, not everyone looks like Mescal in a pair of cutoffs, and some guys may never get over their self-consciousness. I can’t find a single banker or lawyer who has seen shorts on the job (though many decry the rise of stretchy, tapered Lululemon chinos); even those in creative fields don’t appear to be biting. “I don’t see it in the office ever,” adds Levine, who works with corporate fashion brands such as Zara and Madewell. Nordstrom men’s fashion director Jian DeLeon isn’t betting the house on widespread quad liberation, either. “When it comes to showing any sort of skin, many men are ashamed about their calves, body hair, even the lack of tan on their legs,” he says.

And there’s those who caution against the impulse to flash some leg just to show off. “Loins are only to be aired in gyms, pools, bathrooms, and bedrooms, unless the rest of the outfit is so chic that it elevates the loin rather than drawing attention to it,” says the meme-maker known as the Gstaad Guy. “If you are not in the top 5 percent in terms of styling, then you probably can’t pull off different lengths on different occasions — you should stick to trousers.”

Even Levine admits that despite his love of vintage jorts, he still doesn’t feel comfortable embracing the full Juergen look at work. “Maybe I just don’t like my legs,” he says

The Summer of Male Shorts Anxiety