Tired of all of the shorts discourse? Well, we regret to inform you it’s not quite over yet. Plenty has been said as of late about the style on men—how to wear them, when to wear them, and if it’s ever really appropriate to see your male coworkers’ knees—and the deep anxieties they produce in them. Our own Max Berlinger went long on, well, the long shorts of it all, declaring that baggier is, in fact, better. Less has been discussed, however, about the long-lined shorts that have been sweeping women’s silhouettes all summer. And it’s this writer’s belief that they’re the perfect complement to your favorite teeny-tiny tank.
At first glance, these knee-length shorts might feel like a casual, capacious cousin to the flirty capri—or they might give you haunting flashbacks to a particular pair of Limited Too plaid Bermuda shorts that populate elementary-school-era photos from your youth. And yet on the runways, designers from Auralee’s Ryota Iwai to Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten continually return to the knee-length short as the perfect transitional silhouette. Ossou designers Nina Khosla and Talia Shuvalov are drawn to the unexpected tension that the traditionally unsexy style can cause. “A longer short can feel boyish and elegant, covered and sensual, practical and slightly unexpected, all at once,” they say. “It also has enough presence to become a real part of the silhouette, rather than just feeling like a shortened pant. Right now, women are interested in creating character through proportion, rather than simply showing more of the body. It feels more about the attitude of the person wearing it.”
But why this longer, usually baggier silhouette, and why now? In a recent survey of some of NYC’s favorite secondhand-shopping destinations, The RealReal pointed out that Y2K is having a huge comeback—searches for the exact term are up 122% year over year. A California girl at heart, designer Brooke Callahan has a soft spot for the era it hearkens back to. “Board shorts are the perfect way to inject a bit of a masculine edge into any outfit while not limiting you to any one particular style,” she says. “I’ve also seen a lot of talk about the desire for a Blue Crush summer wardrobe—so maybe we just all want to cosplay surfer girls.”
Chan Luu creative director Tessa Tran calls out her own nostalgia for the 2002 film too: “It’s fun to see the resurgence and nostalgia, especially the early-2000s references to Roxy, Blue Crush, and skaters,” she says. “That was my high-school era, so it feels very familiar to me.” CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist Emily Dawn Long enjoys channeling the East Coast equivalent: Carrie Bradshaw in the Hamptons. “I think we just experienced an intense heat wave this past June, and it is a testament to how I feel most summers—I don’t want to feel clothes touching my body,” she says. Whether they be taffeta, tailored, basketball, or board, like the current menswear craze, when it comes to shorts, Bermuda-length is indeed better.
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