These days when 26-year-old NYC councilman Chi Ossé walks into his office, there’s a good chance he’s showing off a lot of thigh. The Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights rep calls skimpy short shorts his “summer work uniform.” “There are moments when I’m going to work and I’m like, Okay, these might be a little too short,” Ossé tells me, clad in his usual getup, which also includes Salomon sneakers and a light-blue button-up shirt: City Hall up top, Mood Ring down below. “But I pride myself on being my authentic self in everything that I do, especially within the world of politics,” he adds. “I would not sacrifice short shorts within the job that I have.”
Ossé might be one of the only elected officials in America who insists on rocking daringly abbreviated bottoms on the job (your move, John Fetterman?), but he is hardly alone in embracing short shorts summer. As the mercury has crept ever higher, so have American men’s inseams. On any given steamy weekday here in New York, a forest of legs sprout in subway cars, bars, restaurants, movie theaters, and parks, as if half the city is on its way to or from Jacob Riis beach.
A parade of celebrities have fanned the flames around the world, namely Chris Pine, Jeremy Allen White, Donald Glover, and, of course, Paul Mescal, the current patron saint of the quadricep. (In June, while attending the Gucci men’s show at Milan Fashion Week in a pair of tailored boxers, Mescal told me that he’s “a fan of the short inseam” and a “big advocate for men wearing shorter shorts.”) Among the notable new converts is Pharrell Williams, who has a famous penchant for tailored shorts that demurely skim the tops of his knees. When the hitmaker served as a torchbearer in the 2024 Olympic opening ceremony last month, he looked like an elite marathoner in his tiny white shorts, quite possibly the shortest he has ever publicly worn.
At GQ, we have spent the past several summers trying to answer a question eternally on our readers’ minds, which is how long (or short) their shorts should be. We have conducted surveys, pondered the wisdom of office shorts and nightlife shorts, employed sabermetrics to come up with an optimal-length formula, and wasted (er, I mean, logged) countless hours debating our personal preferences. But this summer the question was answered for us by countless pairs of jorts, chino cutoffs, boxer shorts, Muay Thai shorts, rugby shorts, and “hoochie daddy shorts”—which are both very short and incredibly tight, according to TikTok, which has driven by unstoppable algorithmic logic so much of the short shorts discourse.
Now, we must accept that short shorts simply capture the spirit of our time. In their scantiness they are a balm for our climate-induced horrors. (Few taboos are more powerful than the desire to be comfortable when it’s hot as hell outside.) In their profound unseriousness they are a sartorial distraction from the overwhelming seriousness of our current moment, a succinct wearable meme. After all, wouldn’t you rather remember living through this history-book summer with your legs out?
