American dress codes seem to grow more lenient by the day. Jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts are ubiquitous among so-called white-collar workers. The taboo against shorts in professional settings, however, has endured. Here in Washington, D.C., the hot, humid summer air feels like a dog’s breath in your face. But legions of male office workers are expected to keep their legs bundled up, even as their female co-workers shiver in the air-conditioned chill. When I exposed my knees at the office recently—I’d biked to work and hadn’t had a chance to change, I swear—I triggered a lively discussion on Slack. I was made to understand that shorts were for children.
Why does the no-shorts rule cling so stubbornly to life, like trousers stuck to sweaty thighs in June? No one has a satisfying answer. It might be the most illogical fashion convention still standing. That means its days are probably numbered, and the glorious era of leg liberation is nigh.
There was a time when shorts really were for little boys. In the late-Victorian period, British schools adopted short pants for the youngest male students. This practice eventually spilled over into non-Commonwealth countries. Steve Knorsch, the U.S. managing director for the men’s clothier Cad & the Dandy, told me that at his all-boys school in 1970s Belgium, he wore shorts as part of his uniform—along with knee-length socks, a blazer, and a tie—until he was old enough for pants.
The association between shorts and children was still strong in 1932, when the diminutive English tennis star Bunny Austin decided he was done running around in “sweat-soaked trousers,” as he later put it, and debuted shorts at the U.S. National Championships. “With his white linen hat and his flannel shorts, the little English player looked like an A. A. Milne production,” The New York Times observed. Perhaps he did have an air of Christopher Robin about him, but Austin would go on to make two Wimbledon finals and introduce shorts to Centre Court. He lost the matches, but shorts won the war. In genteel athletic contexts, at least, grown men could shed their pants without worrying what the Times might say.
[Read: The boys who wear shorts all winter]
The fashion historian James Laver observes that menswear tends to originate on the sports field or the battlefield. During World War II, a huge number of British and Commonwealth soldiers wore shorts in Africa, popularizing the look. “After the war, you’re going to get a hell of a lot of khaki shorts in Army and Navy stores and things like that,” the eminent menswear journalist G. Bruce Boyer told me. “So guys started to wear them to wash the car, and then maybe even to play golf, and so forth.” In the ’50s, Bermuda shorts—a knee-length trouser accepted as formal wear on that island and absolutely nowhere else—caught on among the country-club set.
But a firewall held strong between the settings where shorts were appropriate—the club, the beach, a barbecue—and the office, where they weren’t. Boyer remembers American fashion brands trying to sell men’s suits with short trousers as far back as the ’50s. “The reason you’re not aware of it,” he said, “is because it didn’t work at all.”
Shorts remained forbidden even as other pillars of the office dress code crumbled. Jeans were originally blue-collar work wear. T-shirts used to be undergarments. Polo shirts went from the golf course to the conference room. A decade ago, athletic shoes were still mostly frowned on; now office floors squeak under the tread of chunky Hokas. The recently enacted U.S. Senate dress code, known informally as the SHORTS Act, requires a jacket, a tie, and—you guessed it—long pants. But it doesn’t mention footwear. These days, even members of Congress stalk the Capitol in sneakers.
The clear trend is toward comfort. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, just 3 percent of Americans wear a suit to work most days. Forty-one percent said they wear “business casual clothes,” and 31 percent said they wear street clothes. “These codes do change over time,” Derek Guy, a fashion writer better known as the Menswear Guy, told me. “I can’t give you a reason why, somehow, shorts have been a little more stubborn.”
[Read: Why American workers now dress so casually]
When pressed for an explanation, several experts brought up the former fashion designer Tom Ford. In a 2011 interview with Another Man magazine, Ford outlined his “five easy lessons in how to be a modern gentleman.” Things were going fine (Lesson 4: Don’t be racist or sexist) until the final lesson: “Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.”
“I think a lot of people really took that to heart and were like, Oh, fuck, this is up there with being a gentleman,” Avery Trufelman, the host of the fashion podcast Articles of Interest, told me. “I don’t think it’s too far afield to say part of the stigma, especially in America, comes from Tom Ford.”
Through his publicist, Ford declined to be interviewed for this article. This leaves us to speculate about why shorts might be deemed ungentlemanly. One possibility is that they simply look bad. Certainly, if they’re too long, shorts can visually shorten the legs, which is not particularly flattering. Maybe that’s why the 5-foot-7 Tom Cruise wears full-length jeans, not shorts, while playing beach volleyball in Top Gun. The easy solution is to wear shorts that stop a few inches above the knee. To some shorts skeptics, though, that particular cure would be worse than the disease. “Nobody wants to see your hairy legs,” Knorsch said. “Even if a male body can be very attractive, those long hairy sticks that sit below the waist are not very probably appetizing to look at.” This calls to mind the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode in which Larry David finds himself sitting on an airplane next to a pale middle-aged man wearing shorts. “Let me give you a little tip for travel,” Larry says. “Try not to wear shorts. It’s not all that attractive to look at for five hours.”
The problem with this theory is the inconsistency with which it’s invoked. If men’s legs were really so unsightly, then they would be considered ugly everywhere—but they aren’t. There’s no reason a body part that looks fine at a beer garden or a summer party should suddenly turn grotesque the moment a desk and a laptop appear. “I don’t think there’s anything objectively wrong with them,” Trufelman said. “I just looked out the window at two guys wearing shorts, and I thought they looked quite stylish.”
[Read: Hill staffers are wearing sneakers now]
Finally, even if shorts were inherently bad-looking, that still wouldn’t quite explain the rule, because ugly clothes are a staple of casual office attire. A guy wearing a polo shirt and khakis might be complying with the office dress code, but he’s also wearing a dork uniform. He might be better off with a nice pair of shorts, loafers, and, say, a linen or lightweight cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. For more information, consult Jude Law’s character in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
As is so often the case, a rule binding one of the sexes ends up making both worse off. Because men are expected to wear long pants, office thermostats are set to unreasonably cold temperatures in the summer. Women, dressed sensibly for the weather in skirts and sleeveless blouses, end up shivering all day. It’s a waste of energy and money that makes as much sense as banning sweaters in winter.
Times change. Summers keep getting hotter. In April, as the U.S.-Iran war sent energy prices spiking, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike announced that government workers could wear shorts to the office. “There are fewer and fewer layers to take off, and people are now down to shorts,” she explained to reporters. This year’s World Cup is the first to mandate a water break for players midway through each half. (They also get to wear shorts to work.)
Shorts seem destined to one day join sneakers and jeans as acceptable office attire. In a 2023 Wall Street Journal poll, the position that shorts are never acceptable in an office setting received majority support from only one group: those who were 58 and older. These Baby Boomers are the bosses of American workplaces, but they won’t be forever. Seventy-five percent of Millennials said that “it can sometimes be appropriate” for a man to wear shorts to the office. Eventually, the male knee will be set free. Once that happens, it will be hard to remember why anyone was so afraid of it.