With followers like Paul Mescal, shorts become popular and leave men with exposed thighs

Nickelson Wooster, a fashion consultant and frequent target of street style photographers, is known, among other things, for his taste in shorts. He wears them long and short, loose and tight, in leather, wool and twill.

“Shorts are like skirts, and I think any woman will tell you there is no one length or shape that fits all,” said Wooster, 63, who goes by Nick.

At first glance, it might seem like shorts suffer from nominative determinism—their name (which in English means something like “short”) tries to tell us what to expect from them. In practice, shorts can vary greatly in length. They can reach all the way to the top of the shins or stop just a few inches from the hips.

Yet every few years, the same question resurfaces: how short should they be?

Recently, thanks in part to widely circulated photos of actor Paul Mescal in thigh-baring shorts, there’s a clear answer: really short.

Ross Figlerski, 32, recently started wearing cut-out legs. “I’m a bigger guy, and I find them to be much more flattering and reliable for whatever outfit I end up wearing,” said Figlerski, who lives in Brooklyn.

His fiancée also influenced his thinking about shorts. “She demanded to see more thigh,” he said.

Fashion trends rise and fall like an accordion. In the 1950s, Bermuda shorts, baggy and 12-inch long, hit American beaches. Shorts shrank from there until they peaked with Dolphin shorts, the ubiquitous, tiny cotton athletic shorts worn by Richard Simmons and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s. The seams had nowhere to go but down.

The 1990s and 2000s were dominated by denim, cargo and basketball shorts, all worn long and baggy. Look no further than images of ‘N Sync, basketball player Allen Iverson or the outfits in movies like Clueless and Can’t Hardly Wait.

The recent short-shorts trend seems to have started around the time the hashtag #5inchseam started circulating on TikTok in 2020. Suddenly, the social media platform was abuzz with people clamoring for more men to show off some leg (“5-inch shorts are the male version of cleavage,” reads the caption of one video with over 30,000 likes).

Since then, so-called “thirst trap” shorts have become a more widely popular summer staple for men, with some of the more adventurous adopting running shorts with side slits that leave little to the imagination.

Willie Norris, a designer, said he was interested in “why the short inseam vigour is so strong among straight men.” Gay men, Norris added, have long chosen their inseam length without the same kind of heated debate: “It’s something I see straight men engaging in much more than gay men.”

“These shorter inseams have kind of infiltrated the mainstream in the last few years,” says James Harris of the menswear podcast “Throwing Fits,” where he and his co-host, Lawrence Schlossman, regularly poke fun at the discourse on what constitutes a fashion standard.

Harris suggested that inseams under 5 inches have become more popular in part as a result of young women “swooning” over them on social media. He, for his part, prefers inseams of 3 to 9 inches.

“The longer inseams feel familiar to me, having grown up in the ’90s and 2000s,” Harris said. “It fits with the wider silhouette we’re seeing in menswear in general.”

Nostalgia isn’t the only thing driving fashion choices. Liam Burack, a 15-year-old high school sophomore from Johnstown, Colorado, says “really short” shorts have been popular among his friends since the pandemic, mostly for practical reasons.

“Shorter shorts for me are more comfortable,” he said. “Longer ones are just too heavy and baggy.”

There are signs that the hems of shorts are slowly being pulled back down to earth, however. New collections from Louis Vuitton and Lemaire shown at the menswear shows in Paris last month featured seams falling below the knee.

Mel Ottenberg, a stylist and editor-in-chief of Interview magazine, said he thought “short shorts on the masses are great” but was happy to see “longer, more conservative, boring shorts again.” “Apparently my taste for dad shorts is very much in,” he added.

Wooster attributed the appearance of longer shorts at recent fashion shows to the tendency of high-fashion brands to go against the grain once a trend becomes mainstream. “The minute the pendulum swings one way, I feel like the natural reaction is for things in that rarefied air to change,” he said. “The real trendsetters end up going the other way just because.”

Some designers aren’t thinking too much about which way the wind is blowing. Daiki Suzuki, founder of the Engineered Garments brand, was a bit surprised to hear about the style change in shorts length. Suzuki, whose brand specializes in adventurous and covetable interpretations of Ivy style and American workwear, said he typically keeps inseams between 9 and 11 inches when he’s designing a new style.

“I see shorts as a distinct item,” he said. “Just as women choose between pants and skirts, I approach shorts as a separate category. While length is crucial, so is the width of the leg opening and the thickness of the shorts. I don’t think too much about trends.”

But even though some trends seem to dominate, there seems to be variety among all possible social groups.

Zach Pollakoff, 39, recalled when, as a college student, it felt like a “big statement” if someone was wearing super-short shorts. “It was like, OK, he’s not a frat guy, he’s not an academic. This is an indie music kid.”

But in recent years, he said, it has become harder to use clothing as a shortcut to understanding someone’s taste in music, for example. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“Rules about things like length have become a moving target,” Pollakoff said. “And that makes it kind of irrelevant to have a rule in the first place.”

Harris, the co-host of “Throwing Fits,” said this was indicative of the general direction of men’s fashion these days. “Everybody is doing everything,” he said.

As people seek style inspiration from a variety of newsletters, social media influencers, magazines and other cultural authorities, there is no universal idea of ​​what is right or wrong to wear. “There is no dominant market; there is no dominant archetype,” Harris said.

But for guys who may still be debating how much leg to show this summer, Wooster had some fashion advice. “I’m wearing a length that’s right at the knee,” he said. “Not below, not above — right at the knee. I feel like that’s a failsafe. It’s never going to go bad. That’s the Teflon length.”