Even in blistering heat, CEOs are basically telling employees to “eat my shorts”—and also please don’t wear them. While the pandemic introduced a taste of business casual into the office, norms that reigned supreme decades ago seem to have stuck around. The problem, in part, is that the Earth’s temperature is shifting at a faster rate than our society is, leaving workers sweating through their trousers.
A new Wall Street Journal/Ipsos poll found that shorts at work are still up for debate. Looking specifically at attitudes toward menswear, it found that a whopping 41% said it’s never appropriate for men to wear shorts in the office—no climate-change exception allowed. To be sure, 48% of respondents said it can sometimes be appropriate to wear shorts at work, and 10% said it’s always appropriate.
Women and nonbinary workers, whose clothing choices weren’t a part of the poll, have a different set of rules to follow. In theory, for once, women have a bit more freedom than men in the workplace, as they’re able to wear less-warm clothes including skirts and dresses. But there’s of course more than meets the eye to this wardrobe requirement. Clothing rules are largely made by those at the top, who still happen to be largely cishet men, and skirts are therefore an inherently weighted choice made for what the male gaze deems work-appropriate. “With shorts or, for women, an inappropriate skirt, you’re emphasizing the bottom half (of your body). You don’t want to emphasize the bottom part of your body,” Mary Lou Andre, editor of DressingWell.com, told the Chicago Tribune in 2013. And nonbinary employees are left in a difficult situation, as El Layla Johnson told the New York Times in June of this year: “[They] feel like there’s a manual or rule book that people receive and that my copy got lost in the mail.”
Meanwhile, the urgency of climate disaster was impossible to ignore this summer, as it could be felt in the air and the oppressive heat. During July, the globe barbecued, as the world reached the highest temperature ever recorded. Paleoclimate scientist Darrell Kaufman, who specializes in researching prehistorical evidence of the climate long ago, finds a widely reported stat to be inaccurate: that daily temperatures are the highest in 100,000 years. However, the pace the earth is warming indicates to him that by the end of the century, it will be the hottest in millions of years.
This type of heat isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s deadly: A study from Barcelona Institute for Global Health and France’s health research institute INSERM estimated that more than 61,000 heat-related fatalities occurred last summer. In the U.S., Phoenix is boiling with record highs, and across the ocean the Mediterranean is burning, as heat waves turn to fire in Greece.
Still, even if we have other things to focus on, shorts seem to be just a fashion faux pas too far.
The return-to-office pants debate
As our world continues to warm up without any drastic government intervention, many employees, at least in America, are simply being ushered back to headquarters with emails that cry out that the “office is not optional.” Even if the pandemic has ebbed, the climate is in a different place than it was just three years ago. And yet the office is fossilized, like a gift-shop lollipop with a scorpion wedged inside, stuck in the time of pants.
The general consensus seems to be that corporate America isn’t ready to change its uniform just yet, climate change be damned. The rules regarding shorts are baked into the nation, as fashion historian Heather Vaughan Lee told NPR in 2015: “that Puritan background has continued to influence governments—and other ruling bodies—who seek to control the outward appearance of Americans, either as written law or cultural norms.”
The Puritans were echoing a centuries-old stigma in European fashion against shorts—they were something only boys wore, never a young man. New York Times critic Vanessa Friedman traces this as far back as the court of the British royals, writing that the norm “derives largely from royal tradition” where boys were not allowed to wear pants until they turned 8. Like many other critics, Friedman ruled that shorts and workplace attire are permitted but not without some rules attached, insisting that “you may ultimately be exposing more than just your knees,” if you dare to select a more weather-permitting garb. It took hundreds of years to chip away at this mentality, as pants weren’t really accepted for women until the 1930s, and short bans were issued statewide in the 1940s.
Tradition can be hard to shake after all, especially for older generations that have lived with a specific prevailing attitude their entire lives. The poll found as much, with boomers the most likely to call shorts never acceptable, at 57%. The other generations are, well, chiller about wearing shorts at work. A whopping 75% of millennials found it always or sometimes acceptable to don partial pants at work. Oddly, that number shifted to 67% for Gen Zers, with Gen Xers at 56%.
Even if fashion is slowly changing on the runway and in the office, our desires are in a different spot these days. A recent Deloitte survey found that many are tired of wearing suits (45%) and dress pants or button-downs (31%), and about a third said they’d sooner take a 10% pay cut than dress up at the office. Indeed, remote work has issued in a new, slightly more casual wardrobe.
Some suggest that for men, it’s still not shorts season. In 2011, the great menswear designer Tom Ford issued his infamous decree that “shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach,” adding that a city-dwelling man “should never wear shorts.” The fashion world has changed drastically since then, as gender and clothing norms have been slowly destabilized in both the world and the workplace.
Even if women somehow have a bit more leeway to show their legs or wear other things like skirts or dresses on those unbearably hot climate-crisis days at work, these rules about clothes are largely written by those in charge, who are still often men. With more fashion choices, women have more gendered rules to follow at work, find researchers from the Conversation, who say that “various research has found that perceptions of women in the workplace are still influenced by the way they dress, often in a way that perceptions of men are not.”
It seems as if shorts might not still be what’s hot—though men will start to literally overheat if we don’t change our carbon emissions or our attitudes toward gendered office wear. Whatever comes first, I guess. Ultimately, it’s men’s limitations about societal and fashion norms that will simply lead to their lack of comfort.
