Why Do So Many Men Refuse to Wear Shorts?

A few weeks ago, I fished the clear bin containing my warm weather clothes out of the bottom of my closet. I unloaded most of it without thinking—linen button downs, camp collar rayon shirts, an extremely unflattering race singlet with the logo of an employer that laid me off. But one item gave me pause: a pair of Patagonia Baggies.

When I bought these shorts, with their then trendy five-inch inseam, I imagined myself wearing them forever. But recently, as their length has gone from being brave to acceptable to unremarkable, I have started to have a crisis of faith. This was not because I thought my shorts needed to droop below my knees, as has become vogue on runways, or just barely cover my junk (a la bro-science enjoyer Patrick Schwarzenegger in The White Lotus), but because I had started to become incepted by the idea that men should never wear shorts.

Patient zero: a recent episode of the Throwing Fits podcast featuring Nicolas Gabard, the architect of Husbands’ sculptural suits. When asked whether he ever wears shorts, the scion of style had the kind of terse response that could only be generated by someone after years of introspection: “No.”

Then, a clip from Middlebrow, a culture podcast I started listening to on the recommendation of a very cool friend. “I think shorts are only for sports or water-based activities,” said co-host Brian Park, a comedian-based in Brooklyn.

I initially brushed off both instances. Shorts, I reasoned, offer many competitive advantages over pants. Yes, I could potentially be just as comfortable in trousers constructed of breezy linen that hangs chicly off my skin. But isn’t the simplest, most direct solution to my sweating just to wear less fabric?

I quickly learned this take isn’t just held by people I passively perceive on the powerful rectangle I keep in my pocket—many of my actual friends say they, too, refuse to wear shorts. Michael Whitesides, a political consultant, told me they thought you should only wear shorts when the sun is shining. If it’s dark, they continued, it was only acceptable “on a boat or in some body of water, but even that’s pushing it.” (Several GQ editors agree.) Jeremy Flood, a video producer, compared shorts to a backpack. “There is something adolescent about it that doesn’t grok with my approaching middle age,” he said.

Odder still, when I solicited short takes from my modest Instagram following, more than one person referred me to a clip from The Sopranos where a balding man laboriously gets up from a chair before telling another balding man, “A don doesn’t wear shorts.” (I’ve never seen the show.)

Park, to his credit, didn’t get his anti-shorts orthodoxy from a TV show about organized crime. He adopted the stance after reading a 2011 interview with Tom Ford in AnOther. “A man should never wear shorts in the city,” Ford says in the piece. “Flip-flops and shorts in the city are never appropriate. Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.”

“I read that during a very impressionable time in my youth, when I was just getting into fashion and style,” Park told me over the phone last week. As a competitive tennis player, the take made a lot of sense. Shorts were a functional garment that didn’t really offer him a way to be stylish or express anything about his identity. And he hasn’t seen any evidence that has made him change his mind. “I don’t think I’ve ever looked at an outfit with shorts and thought, this looks better than it would have if the person had paired it with pants.”

Indeed, he and his co-host Dan Rosen believe shorts have no place in standup comedy. When you’re performing in front of a paying audience, your outfit can help you command a presence in the room. “Shorts can break the illusion of authority,” he said.

Other men I spoke with said shorts simply looked weird on their bodies. Rod Thill told me he hasn’t found a pair of shorts that don’t emphasize his above-average height. The Chicago-based content creator, who is 6’4”, says shorts that might sit perfectly in the middle of a shorter person’s thigh, often end up riding up much higher on him. “My proportions are just lanky and awkward,” he said.

Thill’s distaste for shorts stems from his childhood. As a “husky kid,” Thill says shorts were much easier to buy and wear than pants, since it was easier to find a pair that would fit. He’d wear them all year. “I would be wearing a pair of cargo camo shorts with a hoodie in 30-degree weather while I was waiting for the bus,” he recalls. When he considers wearing shorts now, it doesn’t help that the trendy options look like the ones he bought at American Eagle in 2004. “I’ve seen people pull them off, and I definitely envy them.”

When pressed, Park did admit he thought Diplo offered a pretty compelling case for shorts. “But that is the benefit of being a DJ, that you can be in a constant state of arrested development. It’s a prerequisite for your job.”

Of course, most of the people I spoke with do not dress all that formally. Thill describes his aesthetic as “relaxed streetwear.” Park usually records Middlebrow wearing a T-shirt and overshirt. My friend Jeremy rotates between three pairs of identical black chinos. Michael showed up to our mutual friend’s birthday party last Saturday night in a T-shirt with cut-off sleeves.

When I got in touch with Gabard, who had just returned to Paris after a trip to New York for a Husbands trunk show, I expected him to have harsh words for shorts. The founder and creative director is known for practicing what he produces, wearing a suit so often that the one time in lockdown he left his apartment wearing jeans he was photographed by an onlooker. “Even at the beach,” he says, “I come wearing high-waisted trousers.”

Gabard says he hasn’t worn shorts since he was a law student in his 20s. After leaving school, he got into tailoring and ’90s fashion. These clothes became his armor, especially as his body changed. “When I was young, I used to do a lot of sport. But when I started working I lost weight and my legs became quite thin and I didn't think it was very interesting to show them off.”

And yet, Gabard isn’t against shorts for other people, provided you consider the proportions of your body and the silhouette of your outfit. He says stylists like Nick Wooster and Aaron Levine often wear shorts extremely well, because they understand how to balance them with other elements of their outfit and make them part of a coherent whole.

What changed his mind further, he says, was a day he experienced in New York last March. “There was a beautiful day, [73 to 75 degrees], and suddenly the whole city had changed and a lot of people were wearing shorts. This never happens in Paris…and I loved it!” In the end, he saw enough examples of people who had worn shorts in a considered, tasteful way that he started to change his mind about their viability. “Before [this trip], shorts were never to be worn far from the beach or tennis court. But now, I realized they could also be worn in the city.”

With one very important exception: Slim shorts in bright colors with a stiff crease. These, Gabard said, will never be cool.

Thankfully, my Baggies are bulbous and wrinkled. They have earned their spot in my drawer.