I Wore Shorts to Work, and They All Laughed

I Wore Shorts to Work, and They All Laughed: "Women dress for the weather, but men still don't dare."

"It was partly a show of civic-mindedness, but also a way of redressing the disparity between men, who wear a stifling suit and tie to the office in summer, and women, who breeze by in ventilated cotton eyelet skirts with loose silk camisoles or the bubble silhouette dress of the season that barely seems to graze the body."

NYTimes writer Eric Wilson defies convention and tries wearing shorts to work in response to the sweltering summer heat, and reflects about how impractical men's fashion has become on par with women.

We always ridiculed women about how uncomfortable a fashionable woman would rather be, than give up her shoes or cover up her cold numb body in winter, but it is also true that men refuse to cross a certain line even in this summer heat.

"I wore a dressy pair of low-waisted, narrow knee-length navy twill shorts from Joseph, a white dress shirt, brown loafers (no socks) and a tightly tailored gray jacket from Thom Browne, another designer who put shorts suits in his fall collection. I found myself cooler, strangely confident and, because of that, walking more gaily than usual.

But on the street, people stared. Some took pictures."

We are all aware of this double standard, but we never question it.

“It is unfair,” he said. “Women wear flip-flops and miniskirts, and some of them even have their stomachs out. But if I wore shorts, they’d make a big deal of it in the office.”

The only difference in men's summer dress code is to remove the tie and an extra button near the collar. That is supposed to make up for all the heat. Most men even feel uncomfortable wearing short sleeves to work and instead prefer to wear full sleeves with a single or double roll. What is that? How conformist are we?

"The philosopher J C Flügel explained a similar reaction to dress reformers in the 1930’s as rooted in “man’s intense fear of appearing different from his fellows” and also fear of association with tendencies of narcissism and homosexuality."

I guess fashion is just as important for men as it is for women. We just prefer to dress more alike than the opposite gender and therefore prefer to be more boring.