A diatribe against shorts, and various other male fashion offenses:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/fashion/31VIEW.html
Finally, Birds and Pants Legs Head South
By MARSHALL SELLA
LABOR DAY is among this nation's most baffling holidays. My understanding is that it does involve labor, but it seems to serve more famously as some kind of fashion milepost. Specifics are hard to come by, but evidently factory workers may no longer wear white shoes; linen (possibly because it tears easily in machinery) is spurned as one would spurn a rabid dog.
My one certainty is that Labor Day marks a semi-official start to autumn — another mystery, since that leaves the impending solstice looking a bit dejected. Still, the arrival of fall is as inevitable as, well, the change of the seasons, and brings with it one shimmering promise: that the fashion scourge of shorts will soon be expunged from our city's streets.
There's nothing phobic or prudish in my aversion to what are at best incomplete pants, but I would no more wear shorts in public than I would march around yodeling and banging cans together.
Put simply, short pants lack dignity. Even in Bermuda, where they are part of every uniform, I find it hard to take officials who wear them seriously. If arrested there, I'm sure it would cross my mind, at least fleetingly, to try a girlish kick to the constable's shins and then run for it.
Aesthetically, it's often a question of balance. The odds of a man's lower body matching his upper body are lottery-low. Some men possess a Foghorn Leghorn barrel chest supported by spindly little rods; others resemble Michael Caine, and seem to vanish as you scan them from toe to head. Granted, many have achieved a fine proportion between the two realms, but I regard these fellows suspiciously, especially when their legs are tanned and hairless.
Men face a Catch-22 when it comes to avoiding the stigma of pallid, unsightly legs. To wear shorts, you must already have worn them, secretly perhaps, in some private enclave for the leg-ashamed. Or you need to have resorted to a tanning booth to boldly address the problem with brute technology.
It's relevant to add that vanity has nothing to do with my objection to donning shorts. I have no Jane Eyre-type secret that keeps me in long pants — no galloping edema, no gigantic mole shaped like Elaine Stritch. My lower legs are exactly appropriate to their function, which is to help shuttle my brain around as it tends to its daily chores.
There also is no traumatic moment in my history that caused this aversion: no pants-related maternal torture, no schoolyard ridicule. But now that I look back on the issue, I haven't touched shorts with a barge-pole since I moved to New York 10 years ago. Perhaps it struck me that, the farther east one travels, the less appropriate short pants become.
In Los Angeles, men wear shorts with sports coats without a trace of shame; in my former home of Chicago, we wore them because they took just slightly less time to pull on. Move even farther east and the issue sharpens. In London, a man of substance will accede to wearing shorts only when his legs are covered by a coffin lid.
Put it this way: here in Manhattan, I never have that dream where you show up at an important meeting without pants. Mine would be showing up in shorts.
A good deal of the problem is that my lower legs need never be a center of attention. It's always a slow news day for my calves and shins. I see no reason to include them in what amounts to my daily "skin broadcast" to the world. Being so far away from my head and so out of sight, frankly, they're inconsequential. At rare times, they pop into my mind as objects of mild speculation, as interesting to contemplate as the state of my appendix, or crop circles.
No, I contend that short pants now are precisely what they were in the time of Victoria: the dominion of little boys. They bespeak a deliberately (and rightly) frivolous stage of life, one in which males find themselves subjected to every kind of well-intentioned humiliation — that is, having one's clothes chosen, purchased and laid out for them to wear.
If dressing in shorts doesn't entirely reduce you to toddlerdom, it still makes it hard for anyone to take you seriously. Wearing shorts says, "Dude, let's play hackeysack!" Long pants convey a different message altogether — "Mr. Secretary, we have averted the crisis." J.F.K. himself, the patron saint of crisis-aversion and easy style, rarely wore shorts, even when playing touch football. Above all, consider this: a man who wears shorts is a man who went shopping for shorts.
Many men also ignore the darkest of the garment's dark little secrets — the fact that putting on shorts sets off an unexpected fashion dilemma. When you step over the line from long pants to the other thing, my friend, you've got a shoe problem. Put away those lace-ups you wear the rest of the year. It's either sneakers, a dreadful look if you're not engaged in sport at that very moment, or sandals, which make the world your podiatrist.
Then there's the prickly issue of pant length. If your shorts stop just below the knee, you might pass for a Cossack dancer; above the knee, and you're Pinocchio.
I'll admit that shorts, aside from all the money you've saved on 19 inches of extra cloth, have one seeming advantage. They are a tad cooler than long pants. But they're not that much cooler. A baseball cap will heat you up more than anything going on down south. (It's inevitable that the tartan lovers among us will seize this moment to offer their breezy alternative — but kilts may be worn only by a chosen few, and are often accompanied by the penalty accessory of bagpipes.)
In all, Short Pants Man doesn't enjoy any more flexibility than Long Pants Man. A modern male who is well and truly dressed can adapt at a moment's notice. Like "MacGyver," who could make a hang-glider out of lint and blue cheese, Long Pants Man can transform himself, simply by rolling up his pant legs. He is no hostage to circumstance, nor some wizened prude who can't bear to get his feet wet. He has arrived ready for anything: long-pants action and short-pants action. Somewhere, latter-day Lord Fauntleroys are squealing about mosquitoes and poison ivy and, presumably, their haircuts. But Long Pants Man is evolved.
True, he may not be fully evolved, but he is one rung up the ladder closer to Tuxedo Man, that James Bond figure who can save the world while playing baccarat. Of course, not everyone can be Tuxedo Man. But, as autumn so poignantly reminds us, Long Pants Man dwells within us all.
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