Fashion consultant and frequent subject of street style photographers, Nickelson Wooster is known for his taste in shorts among other things. He wears them long and small, Loose and tightin leather, wool and twill.
“Shorts are like skirts and I think any woman will tell you there’s no one length or shape that suits every person,” said Mr Wooster, 63, who goes by Nick.
On the surface, it might appear that the shorts suffer from a case of nominal determinism – their name tries to tell us what to expect from their appearance. In practice, the length of the shorts can vary greatly. They can reach up to the top of the shins or stop a few centimeters from the hip.
Ross Figlerski, 32, recently started leaning into truncated seams. “I’m a bigger guy and I find them much more flattering and reliable for whatever outfit I’m wearing,” said Mr. Figlerski, who lives in Brooklyn.
His fiancee also influenced his thinking about shorts. “He asked to see more thigh,” she said.
Inseam trends move up and down like an accordion. In the 1950s, Bermuda shorts washed up on American shores. The shorts shrank from there until they were filled with Dolfin shorts, the ubiquitous and tiny cotton athletic shorts worn by Richard Simmons and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s. Inseams had nowhere to go but down.
The 1990s and 2000s were dominated by jeans, cargo and basketball shorts, all worn long and baggy. Look no further than ‘N Sync, basketball player Allen Iverson, or the clothes in movies like “Clueless“ and “I can hardly wait.”
The recent short-shorts trend seemed to start around the time the #5inchseam hashtag started trending on TikTok in 2020. Suddenly, the social media platform was filled with people asking for more men to show some leg. (“5-inch shorts are the men’s version of cleavage,” the caption reads on a video with more than 30,000 likes.)
Since then, the so-called thirst trap shorts have become a more popular summer shorts for men, with some of the most adventurous adopting side split shorts that leave little to the imagination.
Designer Willie Norris said she was interested “because the short spine is so powerful with straight men.” Gay men, Mx. Norris added, they’ve long chosen their rod lengths without the same kind of heated debate: “That type of grainy folk attitude is something I see straight men engage in a lot more than gay men.”
“These shorter garments have kind of entered the mainstream over the last few years,” said James Harris of the menswear podcast “Throwing Fits,” where he and co-host Lawrence Slosman regularly discuss the what constitutes modern tailoring.
Mr Harris suggested that five-inch seams had become more popular partly as a result of young women swooning over them on social media. For his part, he prefers either three-inch or nine-inch seams.
“Larger inseams seem somewhat familiar to me growing up in the 90s and 2000s,” Mr Harris said. It matches the looser silhouette we see in menswear in general.
Nostalgia isn’t the only thing driving inseam choices. Liam Burack, a 15-year-old high school sophomore from Johnstown, Colo., says the “short enough” shorts have been popular among his friends since the pandemic, mostly for practical reasons.
“Shorter shorts for me are more comfortable,” he said. “The longer ones are just too heavy and too wide.”
However, there are signs that the hems of shorts are slowly being pulled back down to earth. New collections from Louis Vuitton and Lemaire presented at menswear shows in Paris last month featured seams that slope past the knee.
Mel Ottenberg, stylist and editor-in-chief of Interview magazine, said he thought “short shorts for the masses are great” but was glad to see “longer, conservative, boring shorts” again.
“Apparently my taste in dad shorts is very much in fashion,” she added.
Mr. Wooster attributed the rise of longer shorts in recent catwalk shows to the tendency of high-fashion brands to go against the grain when a trend hits the mass market. “Once the pendulum swings in one direction, I feel like the natural reaction is to change things in this rarefied air,” he said. “True connoisseurs end up following the opposite just because.”
Some designers don’t think too much about how the wind is blowing. Daiki Suzuki, founder of the Engineered Garments brand, was surprised to learn about the shift style in short lengths. Mr. Suzuki, whose label specializes in adventurous and coveted interpretations of Ivy style and American workwear, said he usually keeps inseams between 9 and 11 inches when designing a new pair.
“I see shorts as a separate item,” he said. “Just as women choose between pants and skirts, I approach shorts as a separate category. While length is crucial, so is the width of the leg opening and the thickness of the shorts. I don’t think about trends that much.”
But although certain tendencies seem to predominate, there seems to be variety among every possible social group.
Zach Pollakoff, 39, recalled when, as a college student, it seemed like a “big statement” to wear super short shorts. “He was like, OK, he’s not a dude, he’s not an academic. This is an independent music kid.”
But in recent years, he said, it’s become harder to use clothing as a shortcut to understanding someone’s taste in music, for example. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“The rules around things like inseams have become a moving target,” Mr. Pollakoff said. “And it makes it kind of irrelevant to have a rule in the first place.”
Mr Harris, the co-presenter of ‘Throwing Fits’, said this was indicative of the general direction of menswear these days. “Everybody’s doing everything,” he said.
As people seek style inspiration from an array of newsletters, social media influencers, glossy magazines and other cultural authorities, there is no universal idea of what is right or wrong to wear.
“There is not a single dominant market. there is no one dominant archetype,” Mr. Harris said.
But for guys who may still be debating how much leg to show this summer, Mr. Wooster had some fashion advice.
“I’m wearing a length that’s right at the knee,” she said. “Not below or above – right at the knee. I feel this is unmistakable. It will never be bad. That’s the length of the Teflon.”
