Figure 1.--This 1978 French photograph, I assume a Paris scene, shows most of the boys wearing long shorts.
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Figure 1.--This 1978 French photograph, I assume a Paris scene, shows most of the boys wearing long shorts. |
A new style of longer shorts for younger boys first appeared in France in the late 1970s. For some reason they did not begin crossing the channel until the late 1980s. HBC did not notice these shorts in England during most of the 1980s and thought at first that the appeared in France during the mid-1980s. Inforation from France, however, shows boys clearly wearing the longer style in the late 1970s. Why the style took so long to cross the Channel or appear in the United states is not clear. In the early 1990s they began becoming popular in England and elsewhere in Europe, replacing the very short-cut shorts that had been popular. They reached America in the mid -1990s and Japan in the late 1990s.
A HBC reader alerted HBC that our page on long shorts initially said that they started in France in the late 1980s. He reports, "They may have started in France, but I think that it was a decade earlier. I recently bought a book of photographs by Robert Doisneau that includes a picture labelled "Rue de Rivoli, 1978" in which a group of children about 6
years old are crossing a street. Of 11 boys, 6 wear shorts that reach to their
knees or a little bit below, 4 wear long pants, and one wears short shorts."
Figure 2.--This enlargement shows the longer sghorts that French boys began wearing in the late 1970s. Notice the one boy wearing a smock. |
A HBC reader reports," I have a number of old catalogs from the German mail order company Quelle. In the Spring/Summer 1980 edition, the page of shorts for school-age boys shows 4 kinds of short shorts, but the featured model reaches to just above the knees. It is described as "Bermuda-Shorts, ein echter Hit!" Subsequent editions of Quelle show more Bermudas than short shorts.
For some reason these French styled longer shorts did not begin crossing the channel until the late 1980s. HBC did not notice these shorts in England during most of the 1980s and thought at first that the appeared in France during the mid-1980s.
Coincidentally, it was in 1980 that shorts shorts became the predominant form of shorts in the US. American catalogs that year were filled with different models of running shorts with very short inseams. The early 1980s were the heyday of short shorts for American boys, until the ominous appearance of "jams" in the middle of the decade. After that, American boys fell into line with the European.
Japanese boys began wearing short cut short pants in the 1950s. This styled continued through the 1980s. Thy did not begin wearing the longer style until the mid-1990s.
Figure 3.--This enlargement shows the rest of the children in the crocidele. Again many boys wear the long shorts. |
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