The back-and-forth over men wearing shorts is similar to an East Coast cicada infestation. Every few summers it returns. This is one of those summers.
In July, The Times published an article about Japanese workplaces that were allowing men to wear shorts in concession to rising temperatures. Not everyone was pleased with this slackening of the dress code.
Last week, David Coggins wrote a piece for Times Opinion, “Accept Your Fate. Don’t Wear Shorts to the Office.” As I write this, it has generated nearly 900 comments. New York Magazine has labeled this season as “The Summer of Male Shorts Anxiety.”
Reading Coggins’s essay, I thought back to June, when I perspired through men’s fashion week in Paris during the peak of France’s record-setting canicule. The trip would double as an intimate reminder that our warming world will have, and in some ways is already having, a real impact on how we dress ahead.
One evening as I sat at a bar sweating in trousers, I told a friend, “Tomorrow, I’m wearing shorts.” The next morning I retreated in cowardice to pants. The black, pleated shorts in my bag felt too casual for what was, ultimately, a work commitment.
I again spent the day uncomfortable and sticky in the name of presentability. I could feel the sweat congregating around my thighs before I’d even had lunch. Wouldn’t I have been happier to have just worn shorts? And so this week I made the leap: I wore shorts to work.
My first critic came before I was even out the door.
“Are you wearing … shorts?” my wife said, eyeing my exposed calves. I’d paired the black cotton shorts with a striped button-up shirt and black slip-ons. I thought I looked put together.
She concluded otherwise: “A bit casual, isn’t it?”
I pushed on. Walking from the subway with my work bag on my shoulder, I felt the breeze of Midtown Manhattan on my thighs. The wind was refreshing, sure, but I also enjoyed feeling a bit audacious as I passed so many businessmen in slacks. I wasn’t like them. I couldn’t be bent to corporate standards. I had made my own decision. I’d bucked conformity.
Beyond this being a hot summer in a string of hot summers, any uptake in shorts is also driven by the feeling of daring they convey. A daring that is often interpreted as sexiness. You can peg this thinking to Harry Styles in his shorty shorts, or to the rise of run clubs, or to it being a part of the body that’s not always visible. But we have come to see the upper leg as something tantalizing, something, often, desired.
Yet, in the office at my desk, it was unsettling to see so much of my own leg hair against our office’s marled gray carpet. It made me consider my legs anew. Was I always so hairy? When I’d gotten dressed that morning, I noticed a red spot, maybe a bug bite on my shin. It looked unseemly. I tried to fleck it away. I was scrutinizing my body in new and annoying ways. We so often dress to hide our bodily insecurities. It’s not really about showing too much but about showing “the wrong things.”
But maybe, I just needed to get used to seeing my legs. As the day went on, I stopped trying to tug down my shorts to hide more of my legs. I made it through a meeting without anyone acknowledging my exposed knees. The next day, I put shorts on again.
Other things worth knowing about:
I am an original P.I.B. (person in black) dresser from the punk era that became an N.Y.C. cliché. I’m still in the all-black trim jeans, black T-shirt look, but as I near retirement, I’m starting to wonder if I’m an anachronism. Even worse, am I making myself ridiculous at my age? — Rick, Trenton, N.J.
The issue is not the black. The issue is that you associate your wardrobe with your most formative adult years, which you have now left behind. Our wardrobes need to evolve with our lives and senses of self, and if yours has not — if you are still wearing the same clothes you wore when you were in your 20s — the effect may be as much internal as external. … Read more.
