Who wears short-shorts?

Article in the NYTimes this morning about the rise of shorts in male formal wear.

This is interesting for a few reasons. 1) Outside of, maybe, very fashionable gay men, I don't think any man will start wearing this look. 2) The only exception to 1) is, maybe, people who enjoy looking like 8-year old boys dressed up for Sunday school (this could be known as the 'Pee Wee Herman' look)

3) is a little more involved.


The article goes on to discuss the rise of "showing some skin" in men's fashion more generally. The concept is that men have spent all this time in the gym getting these perfect, perfect bodies and they want to show them off. So what examples do they give us? A professional hockey player who is also a self-described fashion maeven; David Beckham, who I suppose could still be called a professional athlete, but is really more like a model at this point; and Anderson Cooper, who is clearly a celebrity and, though he may be a fine, fine newsman, is obviously in a business in which being attractive matters enormously.

So why is this interesting? Because at one point the elite males were not necessarily the most attractive people. The selecting simply wasn't being done on looks or muscle-tone or even upright-posture. No, the selection had to do with bloodlines and political skill and, perhaps, military ability. So you ended up with the European nobility, many of whom were just shivering piles of regressive genes that couldn't pass for a male model if they devoted themselves to nothing else.

But these were the elite. So these were the people spending time and money at clothiers. So fashion developed to try and make normal-bodied people look good, or at least as good as they could. This is actually the goal behind most of traditional male formal wear. You'll notice that it all looks pretty much the same: don't stand out, because if you're not an adonis, standing out will not be to your benefit. Also, have some padded shoulders to give your sloped, world-weary frame the impression of vigorous masculinity. Keep every thing in simple lines to hopefully distract from the decidely un-simple lines of your paunchy, crap body.

But now-a-days we have entire industries made up of the prettiest. We have entire elites (Hollywood, pro-athletes, news anchors, to a slightly-lesser-but-rising-all-the-time extent politicians) who are largely selected on the basis of physical perfection. These people do not need fashion to hide their faults, they want fashion to showcase their perfection. Thus more skin, tighter, etc., etc.

I should add that women's fashion went through much the same process, only earlier. Go back to the staid victorian fashions with their corsets and bustles and the like and notice that they too are designed to make any woman look at least passably attractive. But a mini-skirt and a tank-top really is not attractive on everyone, despite what the unattractive might fool themselves into thinking.