For Men, It’s Going to Be a Big Shorts Summer

Reported by Vogue.

The age of the thigh-baring short had a good run. For several summers, men like Paul Mescal and Donald Glover made abbreviated inseams their calling card, while Prada, Tom Ford, and Saint Laurent sent barely-there shorts down their runways with full confidence. Then, as tends to happen in fashion, the pendulum swung — hard in the other direction.

According to Vogue, big shorts are the defining silhouette of this summer: voluminous, below-the-knee, cut with the kind of sweep and ease that announces itself before you do. Designer Willy Chavarria, who has long built his collections around generously proportioned shorts, traces their cultural roots through workwear, skate, sport, and Chicano style. "The rejection of restrictive dressing — all of that filters into the silhouette," he says. He also points to a generational shift in how men relate to their wardrobes. After years of slim, fitted, hyper-controlled dressing, oversized shorts offer something different: movement, confidence, and a deliberate refusal to be contained.

From the Runway to the Curb

The moment many credit with solidifying the trend was Jonathan Anderson's debut menswear collection for Dior — a tailored jacket and stockman tie up top, billowing white cargo shorts below, the silhouette drawn from an archival 1948 Dior dress. That image planted a flag. Toronto-based content creator Sam Bolianatz sees it as a natural extension of the baggy-pants arc that's dominated menswear for the past few years: once the bigger trouser went mainstream, the bigger short followed. Bruce Pask, AVP of the Men's Fashion Office at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, has been ahead of the curve, rotating through skort-style cargos, oversized cotton utility shorts, and everything between — crediting their "airy, breezy feel" as a genuine case for wearing them in heat, not just in spite of it.

The style also carries a certain geographic and subcultural weight. Los Angeles stylist Maximillian Ryan links longer shorts directly to the West Coast — surf, skate, lowrider, Chicano communities — and sees them as the ideal bridge piece between formal and streetwear sensibilities, the garment that holds both worlds in a single hem. New York designer Henry Zankov reads them as something else entirely: "Big shorts on men and women feel sexy — they almost mimic the feeling of a skirt. There's an elegance to a more generous cut." Big shorts, it turns out, contain multitudes.

The point isn't that tiny shorts are gone — they're not. It's that choosing volume this summer is a quiet act of defiance: ignoring the obvious, the expected, the thermometer. Big shorts are, at their core, a style statement that refuses to apologize for taking up space.

Read the original at Vogue.