"Men are exposing their legs in public as a reaction to our public behaviour being so tightly policed in public for the last year. They want to feel the wind’s tactile caress on their skin."

Said Prof Andrew Groves, the director of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster, quoted in "Micro shorts for men: how short is too short?/With lockdown easing, will you be following Paul Mescal and Harry Styles and baring more leg than usual this summer?" (The Guardian). 

This isn't just another men-in-shorts article. This is the news that men are going back to the kind of short shorts runners wore in the 1970s. 

And it's a Gen Z thing. So says Shane C Kurup, a Men’s Health’s editor: “They are the most socially aware, health-conscious generation we’ve ever seen. There’s a strong emphasis among this generation of being comfortable in your own skin and not blindly conforming to a prescribed body type.” 

Great! I'm looking forward to a clown show of atrocious fashion. And I intend to enjoy the fun of the Z kids annoying the millennials. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Amadeus 48 writes:

Your short note on shorts impelled me to dig up the following quote from George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier.” Orwell got so many things right he seems like a prophet:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth [a new model town favoured by progressive intellectuals] when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got onto it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long gray hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured, ‘Socialists’, as one should say, ‘Red Indians’.”

So, the kiddies of Gen Z may find that their ideas have consequences.