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 (à 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.”