Get Shorty

It's my sartorial sartorial holy grail of short shorts

Having yesterday bitten off the big bite of free speech, cancel culture, and the so-called Harper’s Letter, today I am moving on to even more important quarry: finding the proper-length men’s short.

I’ll try to keep this brief.

First off, I am a man of humble stature. “Five-foot-eight on a good day,” as one wag once described himself to me—that description fits me too. I think that when I wake up in the morning, I am five-eight, not a centimeter (pardon me for mixing metric/British) taller; certainly by the time mid-day shrinkage has set in, I am not that tall. What’s more, I am not accounting for mid-life shrinkage; it may be that I will never see five-eight again, no matter the time of day.

What this means is that shorts with a long inseam (say, anything over eight inches) make me look even shorter, because they come down to my knees, thus revealing very little leg, and making me look like I am an Edwardian schoolboy in knickers. (By the way, William F. Buckley’s late brother Reid wore knickers as an adult; he had a tailor who knickered his pants for him. It was a nice bit of eccentricity, which I saw first-hand.)

Schoolboy in knickers

As a result—and because I tend to overheat, and so prefer to have less fabric on me—I prefer a shorter short. Not go-go boy short, and not running-short short (they have their place, but I am talking about shorts with pockets), so not this—

—but pretty short nonetheless—what I call hiking-shortm short, after a pair of hiking shorts that I bought maybe thirty years ago from Banana Republic. They were olive green, and I loved them. I wore them til they fell apart, literally. I have been searching for their equal ever since. I found a picture on ebay of the shorts of my memory:

Their inseam was, I believe, five inches. Now, inseam doesn’t tell the whole story about how far down a pair of shorts hangs; you also have to take into account where they sit on your hips, and where the inseam begins. But as a general rule, when I have worn shorts with a six-inch inseam, which these days seems as short as one can find, I think to myself, “It should be an inch shorter.”