Shorts not longs

When did it become daring for white men to wear shorts that actually fit?

The answer is 2001. The reason was mostly two-fold: gays and gas prices. And the effect has been an American travesty of literal and figurative sartorial decline unparalleled in the history of man.

But before we deconstruct, let’s reflect on recent observations from in and around the corridors of Toledo’s largest and oldest remaining indoor mall, Westfield Franklin Park. The participant/observer was I, founder of the northwest Ohio regional branch of M2-W2-S2. (Manly Men Who Wear Short Shorts)

Outside in the parking lot was a garish scene of massive metal on wheels: Rows of 11 mpg Ford Explorers among 13 mpg minivans with a few scattered teen-driven Cavalier-type cars with one or two of those ubiquitous Hawaiian leis draped over the inside rearview mirror.

The male occupants of these vehicles varied widely in age and economic class on this particularly sultry Saturday afternoon, but all were in on the same trend which has yet to die: below-the-knee, XXL homeboy-style shorts. “Shorts” they say, but more like skorts or even those for-homos-by-homos ‘Capri’ shorts which infested Fire Island in summers of yesteryear and called to mind clam-digger.

Inside the mall came a pageant of these baggy shorts in many colors, worn by men young to middle-aged, with girlfriends and strollers in hand. There were shorts like green Army fatigues, shorts made for country club wear, shorts that suggested soccer uniforms for the morbidly obese.

Most unsettling was the overabundance of pockets, the “cargoes”. I remember poking fun at this pocketed style back in like 1997. But there it was; still here!

Old stereotypes suggest that gay men would eschew this saggy pant look for tighter and shorter thigh-revealing and package-defining models. But this wasn’t the case. The gays wore shorts as low and baggy as the straights, if not more so.

Clad in red shorts reaching just below mid-thigh – a look not uncommon among GQ cover models from the mid-70s to early 80s – I undoubtedly looked the part of a freak (or East Williamsburg denizen who fell asleep on the L-train and awakened in a Red State).

In fact, under less constrained circumstance I’m sure several mall passersby would have gladly accosted and kicked my ass for such sissy shorts.

This sagging shorts trend seemed to go mainstream in the mid-90s with the so-called “wigger” crowd. The earlier adopters, as I remember, were gangster rappers and college basketball players like the University of Michigan’s “Fab 5”.

The style picked up through the 90s, making it to the A&F and AE sales racks and finally, by the early 2000s, to preppy collegiate J. Crew, which no longer sells shorts that would have fit an 80s yuppie. This trend should have died out in 2001, but instead that was year it became completely ubiquitous.

Several years ago in a couture issue of Peter Cummings’ celebrated XY Magazine, one writer suggested that this baggy shorts trend had outlived traditional fashion cycles because of homophobia and straight men’s unease over the rising glorification and exploitation of the male form in fashion advertisements.

Men had gotten more self-conscious about showing a little leg, he argued, and until they got over it, they would continue covering their bodies in subconscious shame.

Now I will contribute additional scholarship to the XY Magazine thesis:

Notice how shorts grew longer and baggier as our cars grew bigger and petro got cheaper relative to disposable income? (You can overdress and crank the AC when it’s just $1.80 a gallon)

Well, as those two later trends have hit reverse, perhaps we’ll see shorts reversing themselves up the white male thigh.

I could even be contented by a hybrid: shorts slightly shorter, slightly tighter, and hence only slightly gayer. (Just get rid of those ghastly pockets!) In such a bare-knee utopia, it would almost look like 1995.