A brief look at short shorts
How short is too short for your summer jorts?
Short shorts — how high can they go this summer? Fashionably high verging on cringe-worthy high, it seems.
When Kendall Jenner wore teeny, tiny denim shorts — aka “jorts” — on the red carpet for a charity fashion event during the Cannes Film Festival in May, fashionistas swooned at her moxie style.
Her outfit, by Alexandre Vauthier, was a bold send-up of the Cannes obsession with proper red carpet dress code: Besides the shorts, it featured a black cropped, one-shoulder top attached to a long, poofy black train, plus black stilettos, silver necklaces and a sparkly belt.
“Consider this inspiration for dressing up your jorts at your next party,” enthused Teen Vogue.
Really? Can the near butt-baring shorts worn by a 21-year-old supermodel with a super body and a Kardashian-Jenner family tradition of showing lots of skin really be adopted by preteens, teens and women of all sizes everywhere for any occasion?
Maybe not. But by some accounts, especially exasperated parents of girls, the trend for wearing ultra-short shorts — those that look more like under- wear briefs or show substantial sections of butt cheeks — is still strong, and getting stronger.
Heading into vacation season in August — prime shorts-wearing period — you can expect to see these sky-high shorts worn everywhere, including some places they really shouldn’t.
How to define “too short”? How about this: When the pockets in your shorts are longer than the shorts.
Even adult fashion-lovers are irked about ultra-short shorts. Priya Rao, a fashion writer for publications such as InStyle,
Vogue and Vanity Fair, bemoaned in an essay in Refinery29 that shorts for adult women are hopeless these days.
“They are often cut too short, showing off far too much thigh
than I find necessary (more often than not they resemble briefs), and are often times so narrow in the hips that having curves, which I do, prove to be completely undesirable,” she wrote. “Throw in said thighs rubbing together and sweat gathering in your crotch, and it’s a veritable disaster.”
Tsk-tsking about shorts is an annual ritual, but this year it’s even louder thanks to the ridiculous-edging-on-obscene examples spotted on social media, on the street, at the grocery store, at movie theaters, at the airport.
Olivia Munn referred to it as “thigh-high flyin” in an Instagram selfie showing her wearing thighhigh boots and ultra-short cutoffs at an airport following a ComicCon appearance in San Diego.
“Short shorts are a way to show off the body and be provocative, and everyone has a choice on how to show off their body, no matter their size,” says Gabrielle Porcaro, senior fashion-and-market editor for Women’s Health magazine, which just ran a story on comfortable — and flattering — shorts.
“But where you wear it is important: If you’re on a beach, fine, if you’re at work, that’s a whole different story.”
As usual, celebrities have an influence thanks to social media — and some celebrities love them. Ariel Winter, for instance, is a fan. Last month, she posted a picture of herself with a friend wearing really short denim shorts, a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a lowcut top on her Instagram page.
Jenner, her sister Kylie Jenner, model Suki Waterhouse, Jennifer Lawrence, Iggy Azalea, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, Rita Ora all have been spotted wearing ultra-short shorts.
The debate over how short is too short is especially relevant in public schools, where epic battles are fought every spring over dress codes and violations of “the fingertip rule”: Shorts can’t be shorter than a girl’s fingertips with her arms extended down.
(According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 60% of American public schools by 2012 enforced a dress code, a trend also on the way up.)
California family coach Catherine Pearlman, mother of a 13year-old, got viral attention for a blog post about shorts, describing herself as “Sick of the Dress Code Mom” after another run-in with officials at her daughter’s school over the length of her shorts.
Only half-joking, Pearlman invited the principal to take her daughter shopping, noting that a tall girl with long fingers rarely meets the fingertip standard — and she knows this because she has already searched the mall.
“There is nothing else in the stores,” Pearlman says.
Sharon Choksi, a mom in Austin, got so fed up trying to find appropriate shorts that her preteen daughter would wear that she started her own company, Girls Will Be, in 2013 and designs her own line of shorts and shirts.
“People are gobbling them up, which is a huge sign that there is pent-up demand,” she says.
She says the hems on girls’ shorts have been hiking up steadily, while adult styles — shorter, tighter, sexier — have been turning up more often in girls’ wear. She compiled statistics that show girls’ shorts are up to 65% shorter than boys’ shorts even though they aren’t that much different in size.
“Short shorts, bikinis, slim-fitting shirts, I’ve seen all of these over the last five to seven years I’ve been shopping for my daughter, who is 12,” says Choksi. “When she was younger she didn’t want to wear these shorts because they weren’t comfortable, but there was nothing else out there. And it’s stayed that way in the girls’ department, where some shorts have one- or twoinch seams.”
Other parents are rebelling against school dress codes because they believe such codes discriminate against girls and send body-shaming messages just as they’re hitting the turmoil of puberty.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, a feminist writer and mom in Maplewood, N.J., says her then-sixth-grade daughter was “dress coded” in her school in 2012 for wearing too-short shorts: She was pulled out of class and forced to wear a men’s shirt that covered her to her shins because her preteen legs were too much of a “distraction” to pre-teen boys.
Weiss-Wolf, her daughter and a lot of other parents in the school district challenged the dress code with a girls-pride campaign: “#Iammorethanadistraction.”
“I never thought that kids should not be held accountable to a standard; it’s just so tilted against girls’ dignity. ... I’m very opposed to the concept that boys can’t be responsible if they see a girl’s legs,” Weiss-Wolf says.
But of all the potential dramas arising from raising teens, she says, short shorts “are probably the more benign ones.”
“Short shorts are a way to show off the body and be provocative, and everyone has a choice on how to show off their body, no matter their size.” Gabrielle Porcaro, Women’s Health