This summer, shorts go with boots

There are trends in fashion that spread quietly-so quiet in fact that they often don't even seem like trends until you start seeing them on the street, every day, with increasing insistence. One such trend is the custom of wearing boots along with shorts. Nothing overly new, the short and boot combo after all goes back decades, but this year it promises to officially become part of the summer style vocabulary as, last year, it was the turn of Birkenstock tank tops and clogs. The origin of the style in menswear is not crystal clear: in all likelihood the origin is military, as the first men's shorts were employed by Indian troops in Bengal and then copied by British colonists in the late 1800s. Usage then spread among troops deployed in Africa during World War I and II, but by the 1940s the convention existed in the U.S.-the photo taken in 1940 of waiters at the Log Lodge Tavern in Dallas where it was men in shorts and cowboy boots serving the female audience, scandalizing the moralists of the time, remains famous.

If, however, we wanted to point to the true pioneer of this style in the West, we would have to point to a famous English general, Robert Baden Powell, whose most famous contribution to today's culture was the invention of the Boy Scouts and their uniform, which included, needless to say, shorts and ankle boots, in addition to the classic Oxford shoes. The history of style also passes, later in the years, through queer communities, punks, clubbers, and, in short, has become loaded over the years with undertones of rebellion, eroticism, and personal liberation. Finally, style has also arrived on the catwalk and, without wanting to go digging into the archives of past decades, it has emerged this year in a more overt way, as a true canonical "way" of dressing of the stylish elite. 

Dries Van Noten SS23

Givenchy SS23

Acne Studios SS23

Celine SS23

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus FW23

Diort SSS23

DSquared2 FW23

Egonlab FW23

Valentino SS23 Couture

Gucci SS23

JW Anderson FW23

Loewe FW23

Louis Vuitton SS23

No. 21 FW23

Our Legacy FW23

Prada SS23

Rhude FW23

Rick Owens FW23

What is the reason for such a strong spread today? The post-lockdown explosion of clubbing, with the explosive return of the hedonistic, licentious dancefloor dress code outside dancefloors, seems to be responsible. Like so many other conventions derived from the raver world, turned into an object of fetishism by the queer world, and finally exhumed by Gen Z as a trend, that of the boot worn with a short has been much purged of its original connotations that made the classic Wesco Boot an icon of queer fashion (think of how ubiquitous the boots are in Tom of Finland's work) while retaining a sense of originality and vague transgressive appeal. Moving down from the cultural to the merely aesthetic plane, however, the boot paired with the short represents an alternative to the often low and flat summer shoes. For reasons of proportion, indeed, a sneaker that is too bulky goes badly with a bare calf - and the same can be said of a sneaker that is too small, low and flat, which instead causes the dreaded "duck effect." The search for a visual balance that does not leave the leg too uncovered, ruining the harmony of the look, in recent years, has been solved with the classic white sock, a solution that seemed to have solved the problem of summer menswear, but is now perhaps so widespread that it has stopped looking interesting.

Like any trend, the trend of shorts with boots walks on the very sharp edge of cliché, always in danger of plunging into the abyss of cringe. The success or otherwise of the look rests entirely in the characteristics of the short in question, which tends never to be a cargo boot with exceptions. As for the boot itself, we feel like siding with tradition and saying that the only safe model for this styling is the combat boot and its affiliates, never the English chelsea boot and less than ever the cowboy boot which is scarcely donning for men off the runway, with a few obvious exceptions that are self-explanatory, with all due respect to Ms. Prada and Raf Simons but also the waiters at the Log Lodge Tavern in Dallas. And this is both because the style was born right out of the combat boot, and because the idea behind it is to create a sort of figurative plinth or pedestal for the body - the more "slim" cowboy or Chelsea boots, on the other hand, create an overly slouchy silhouette, since their purpose is to make the foot appear more graceful and, as it were, pointed. As for the height and distance between the two elements, however, the norm would have it that there should be some distance between the hem of the short and the boot, although both Balenciaga and Rick Owens and Givenchy have shown that while maintaining a certain monochromaticity, one can use a boot that is tall and structured enough to match barefoot with a short that falls past the knees. This is risky territory, however, and those who cross it do so at their own risk.