For at least the last half-decade, menswear has been preoccupied with pants. In recent years, trousers have gotten bigger, wider, and slouchier, with sharp pleats pinched like folded paper and hems that pool over shoes with ease. They became the true statement-makers of an outfit. Designers spent season after season stretching the silhouette until there was seemingly nowhere left to go. And if this Paris Fashion Week proved anything, it’s that there’s a new hotbed for menswear experimentation: shorts.
Shorts—an admittedly not-uncommon garment to find in a spring-summer collection—were an eerily timely trend in light of the French heatwave that dominated the week. Even so, while the industry’s stance on trousers still rages on (they should be comfortably roomy, except when they are not), their smaller counterparts offer a refreshingly wide-open frontier. Lengths are all over the map. Proportions swing wildly from collection to collection. Tailoring, sportswear, and workwear are all colliding somewhere between the waist and the knee—or, depending on the designer, well below it.
Courtesy of Soshiotsuki
Few collections captured this energy better than Soshiotsuki, the namesake label of Japanese designer and recent LVMH Prize winner Soshi Otsuki. His latest outing was filled with beautifully relaxed tailoring, breezy button-up, and enough shorts to satisfy just about any desire. It looked like the easygoing City Boy style championed by Popeye magazine had grown up, landed a corporate job, and still refused to lose its cool. Otsuki paired cuffed long shorts with structured jackets and skimpier pairs with double-breasted blazers. Some borrowed the striped fabrics and crumpled ease of boxer shorts, while others looked like trousers gone rogue (even down to the undone twisted-leather belts). The collection delivered a compelling vision for modern office dressing. Just as importantly, it suggested that shorts of all kinds deserve a place in sharp, contemporary wardrobes.
