Free the knee?

Is it okay to wear shorts to the office? Inside the polarizing debate

IT’S BEEN A hot summer, and to make matters worse, Big Khaki has you believing yourself to be a prisoner to the long pant — sweltered, constricted and shackled by the received wisdom that the office is no place for a pair of shorts.

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And yet, as the temps rise, more do the gams yearn to be freed. With these last few weeks of summer ahead, you might start wondering whether you could sneak in a pair of shorts now and again. Would anyone notice? Would anyone care?

The shorts in the office debate has sparked up again this year, as it often does around this time. Bloomberg, sensing the change in the winds, conducted a poll of traders, portfolio managers and strategists, asking one simple question: Is it ever okay to wear shorts in the office?

“Only 45 per cent said yes, which is, frankly, more than I expected,” wrote Bloomberg’s Chris Rovzar. “Is it not time for a change? If it’s over 90F (32C), shouldn’t we be allowed to wear shorts to the office? Life’s too short to be so uncomfortable.”

But the real rub is that change is happening on the shorts question. In April, Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike announced that male municipal workers would be allowed to wear shorts to work, in an effort to reduce air conditioning use amid an energy price shock. At Instagram, head honcho Adam Mosseri told Business Insider that he was pro-shorts. “When it hits, it hits,” he said of wearing shorts. “But not everyone can pull them off, and not all shorts are created equal.”

This change is not coming from above, though. Employees have felt differently than their overlords about shorts for some time. In 2023, a Korn Ferry survey found that 58 per cent of employees viewed it is acceptable for men to wear shorts in the office, especially among younger workers. “To some degree, the cry to toss the long pants is generational,” they wrote, noting that among millennials, 75 per cent were okay with shorts.

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“Shorts are a new threshold,” said Korn Ferry’s Ron Porter. “It’s crossing a boundary of informality and casualness.”

Right now, the heat is the obvious culprit for the sky’s out, thighs out attitude. We will have to wait and see what the fall brings, though — will we see the knee slink back into some pants, tucked away for another year? Maybe. Or maybe not, said co-founder of L’Etiquette magazine Gauthier Borsarello, who thinks the shorts trend is about more than just the heat.

“There’s something happening with men and their legs right now, and I don’t think it’s just the heat,” they told The Cut. “It’s a part of the body you can choose to reveal, deliberately, for a season, and a shorter short in summer does exactly that.” Kieran Delamont