I’m scared of shorts. They make me nervous. This is clearly a bit silly. I mean, it’s not like they are actually going to bite me on the bum. But then fear is seldom rational. If I see a spider in the sink, it doesn’t help at all to know that it isn’t going to hurt me. And I’m not alone in my borderline shorts-phobia. After all, it is perfectly normal to talk about being brave enough to wear shorts.
This is not just about the brevity of a hemline. Shorts that end halfway up your thighs feels like a more radical choice than a dress that exposes the same amount of leg. Naked dressing has been increasingly normalised – see-through dresses, ab-baring crop tops – but shorts still feel daring in any context outside a holiday.
But that is changing. I think this is partly because we are realising that dressing more sustainably is best served by having fewer, more versatile clothes. Instead of buying a new dress when you get invited to a wedding or filling a suitcase with jelly shoes and beach cover-ups that have zero utility outside your week on the beach, work towards a streamlined modern wardrobe whose pieces can be mixed and matched in different ways. The most important metric of sustainability is to make everything you own work hard, extracting maximum wear from it.
There is a second reason why now is the right time for shorts to go mainstream. This has been the year of trousers. Proper, tailored trousers – not jeans, nothing stretchy – have been the biggest fashion story of 2024. And yes, I know cowboy boots have had more column inches, but the pivot from wearing longish skirts and dresses to wearing trousers matters more. This has been the key real-talk shift in women’s wardrobes recently.
Getting the hang of wearing trousers that aren’t jeans has helped me to get my head around wearing shorts that aren’t jean shorts. We tend to imagine shorts as a cut-off version of whatever trousers we are used to wearing. This is why, for years and years, denim cut-offs were the only shorts game in town, because jeans were the dominant trousers in our wardrobe. The shift from jeans to trousers has brought cotton or linen shorts that have their own shape, rather than just hugging yours, back into play.