Movie Depictions of Short Pants: Disparities


Figure 1.-

At times movie costuming seems to have reflected standard dress or social-class appropriateness. At other times we seem to note differences between costuming and popular dress. Thus there are times when movies seem to reflect popular fashion realtively accurately and other times they do not. Thus the period and individual film needs to be considered when assessing the accuracy of film depictions. One question which emerges is why have so few American boys costumed in short panrs since the 1930s. This was probably reasonably accurate in the 1950s, but has not been since the 1960s. We are not sure why this has been. We tend to think that the reason was box office appeal, but HBC readers have some other ideas.

Audience Appeal

We tend to believe that movie costuming was grafted to appeal to the audience to make the characters more appealing. As children and teenagers came to compose a larger proportion of the box office, more thought was given as to how to make the child and teen actors more appealing. For boys this meant clothes tht were decidely boyish without the suggestion of juvenile clothes. For teens this meant hip, trendy clothes which also meant long pants. Jeans wre a popular choice. We believe that this trend continued into the 60s ans 70s because producers remembered their childhood attitudes toward clothes. We can not yet confirm this because we have actual information on movie making decession making, but suggest this is the case. The attitudes of boys toward shorts seems to have changed by the 1970s, a change which may not have been reflected in the adults making films. A reader writes, " I was in elementary school in the 1960s, and I never had any awareness of formal shorts ever having existed. I grew up thinking of shorts as being inherently casual wear. (I think that while older people may have thought that formal shorts were closely related to adults' formal slacks, in my mind when I was about 6 years old, shorts were closely related to swimming trunks. Occasionally, when there was an unexpected chance to swim, kids would use shorts if they didn't have a swimming suit.)

Physical Appearance

A reader writes, "You ask on your site whether anyone has any guesses about why children in movies and television rarely wear short pants. I can make some guesses, although a professional photographer or costumer would know better than I would. Something I find much more surprising is that children rarely wear short-sleeve shirts in movies and television. I see many more children wearing short-sleeve shirts than children wearing shorts. I suspect that many children may not photograph well in shorts. I remember from when I was growing up that some children with very skinny or bony legs didn't look good in shorts. (This is a reason I avoided wearing shorts.) It seems that a lot of thin children are cast in movies and television. They may not want to hire a thin actor who they think is good looking and risk ruining the effect by showing him in shorts. This may also be the case with overweight actors.

Technical Factors

A reader also writes, "If an actor wears long pants, it would also mean that there would be less flesh for the make-up artist to worry about. Since they are dealing with children, it might also be a concern that if the actors are wearing long pants and long-sleeve shirts there is less flesh to keep clean in order that the actors will have the imaculate look that children usually have in movies or television. Also, a lot of child actors seem to have light complexions and wearing long pants means less risk of sunburn and that less sunburned skin will be visible if the actor does get a sunburn. The intense summer sunlight in Southern California would make sunburn more of a risk that in most places, and a lot is filmed in Southern California. For similar reasons they might want to avoid possible continuity problems with an actor who gets suntans easily.








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Created: 10:36 PM 10/27/2005
Last updated: 10:36 PM 10/27/2005