"For prospects rising through the Milwaukee Brewers’ farm system, and even established veterans on a rehab assignment, wearing lederhosen is a rite of passage."

"No, this isn’t some elaborate rookie hazing prank... it’s the result of Friday’s theme night at High-A Wisconsin, one in which the team normally known as the Timber Rattlers becomes the Brats as part of Bratoberfest, a play on Germany’s iconic Oktoberfest, while also paying homage to the state that’s home to one of the highest concentrations of residents with German ancestry. It just so happened that Abner Uribe, the Brewers’ flame-throwing reliever who is working his way back from a flexor strain, was in town on his rehab assignment...."

The NYT picks up the best Milwaukee Brewers story of the day: "Brewers’ Abner Uribe delights fans in ‘Brats’ lederhosen uniform during minor-league rehab."

Humiliating? Or is it wonderful... bratoberfestive!

I could watch the Green Bay Packers exhibition game, women’s college volleyball, the team with the best record in baseball the Milwaukee Brewers, the Winn-Dixie 250, high school football, WWE SmackDown, or…Abner Uribe in lederhosen. You tell me… pic.twitter.com/lZWfgdxMLi

— Steve Palec (@stevepalec) August 29, 2026

ADDED: I have a bit of a tags quandary for this post. I don't like tag proliferation, but this isn't the first appearance of lederhosen on this blog. It's the fourth. See them all here. But all the other times, I was able to use my well-loved tag "men in shorts." But this baseball take on lederhosen avoids the baseball travesty of shorts — White Sox, 1976 — and sticks with traditional knickers. As I've said before, I like the knickers and wish all the players would wear them and not those pajama-looking long pants, but I'm still not making a tag for knickers. But if I did, I'd have 12 "knickers" posts now. 

Let me highlight the best of those old "knickers" posts. I remembered that the Young Rascals wore knickers. I found this 1926 song with the lyric: "Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide/Nobody knows who's walking inside!" I said that David Brooks: "expatiated about the good old days when men like George Washington displayed their thighs in tight silk knickers."

And, in 2008, before I got together with Meade and started watching baseball again, there were TVs outside State Street Brats just as The Backstreet Boys were singing the national anthem to open the World Series. I blogged: "The players look like hell! When did they stop wearing stockings and knickers? Those long pants look like pajamas."

And there was Meade, the first commenter: "I must be smoking too much blog. I hallucinated." Because the video looked like this:



Key word linking the end of this post to the beginning: brats.

I see my name invoked over at Instapundit.

It's on the old "men in shorts" topic. Something about women being able to wear "sundresses" to work. I think the term "sundresses" is being used to mean sleeveless dresses. An actual sundress wouldn't look any more professional than a man in shorts, but sleeveless dresses exist and might look okay in the office. But isn't the office air conditioned? I think women are more likely to put on a sweater than to want their bare arms exposed. 

Anyway, my classic men-in-shorts topic was about men looking like children. It all started back in 2006. It all started with something Tom Wolfe wrote in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" [commission earned]. "I was amused," I blogged, "to run across this description of a man wearing shorts":

All that elegance was what made the personage of Dr. Lewin seem so curious. Last week, when the class first met, he had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of his gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead -- unaccountably addressing thirty college students, at Dupont, no less.

That's my motivation. Trying to encourage you to eschew the look of an ossified 7-year-old. 

Socialists in shorts.

I'm reading the NYT article "Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment? A string of primary wins by progressive candidates has revealed the strength of a high-energy insurgent movement but also its potential limitations," which you can read for yourself at that gift link.

It's a topic I'm following, and I've recently blogged about. I said it a week ago: "The socialists are to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party was to the GOP."

So right now, all I want to do is put up something I cropped from one of the photographs:

"Dr. Abdul El-Sayed tried to attract young voters," and he did. They came toddling in wearing shorts, shuffling in slides and sneakers.

If I were a NYT essayist, I'd muse that they are showing us what real, human, embodied and, yes male power can look like.

ADDED: After publishing this post, I dashed off a question to Grok, "Can the males wear shorts and slides to the revolution?" Answer:

"It has been an ungodly hot summer, but the shorts trend isn’t all about comfort. Some men seem to simply like the attention."

"'There’s something happening with men and their legs right now, and I don’t think it’s just the heat,' says Gauthier Borsarello, the creative director and co-founder of L’Étiquette magazine. Borsarello clocks the influence of celebrities such as Harry Styles and Paul Mescal, who are regularly photographed displaying the 'confident, slightly retro masculinity' of skimpy running shorts.... The shorts discourse is playing out as men are becoming more sophisticated in how they wield their sex appeal. 'They’re paying more attention to themselves overall, how they’re perceived, how they curate a silhouette, and thighs have quietly become part of that conversation,' Borsarello says. 'It’s a part of the body you can choose to reveal, deliberately, for a season, and a shorter short in summer does exactly that.'"

Writes Samuel Hine, in "The Summer of Male Shorts Anxiety" (NY Magazine).

As for that "'confident, slightly retro masculinity' of skimpy running shorts" — yes, if by retro, you mean the 1970s.

"Mirror," the tag.

That last post really needed the tag "mirror." How did I come so far without a tag for mirror? I made one, then had 22+ years of the blog to search to add the tag retrospectively. It was easy to search for the word "mirror," but hard to separate the posts that deserved the tag — the ones referring to the object, a mirror — from the ones that did not — the ones using "mirror" as a dying metaphor (ideas "mirror" other ideas and so forth). And then there's the drudgery of adding the tag and republishing. But in the end, there's the fun of clicking on the tag and peering into the kaleidoscope.

There was "Fun with Mirrors" in 2008:

There was, also in 2008, the convex mirror I loved and wanted to buy:

"It's expensive — over $1800 — but as I thought about possibly buying it, I realized what I wanted it for was to take pictures, and therefore what I really should buy is a fisheye lens for my Nikon D50." So I got that fisheye lens. If you're nostalgic for those days, click the tag "fisheye." 

There was this advice about dolphins, in 2014: "People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the 'expression' you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is 'smiling' because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone."

There was the mystery of what a monkey sees in a mirror, back in 2005: "What's in the monkey's mind when he looks in a mirror? Higher minds -- human beings, great apes, dolphins -- figure out, when they are looking in a mirror, that they are seeing themselves. Other animals, it's long been thought, think they're seeing a stranger. But a new study shows that the monkey occupies a middle position, where it doesn't see itself, but it doesn't see a stranger either. The monkey sees a 'Puzzling Other.'"

In 2024, I had Grok outline a book for me. It was titled "Through the Glass/Exploring Mirrors as Portals to Other worlds."

I was surprised to see that, back in 2013, I'd contributed to my long-running men-in-shorts theme with this stark advice: "Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me?"

There was this good question, in 2013: "If someone holds up a mirror and you say 'I look like an idiot,' is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?"

There was the sunset in my rear-view mirror as I drove 500 miles to see Meade in 2009:

"And a few women describe the experience of 'leg hair harassment' or a term coined online as 'sunehara,' referring to the discomfort of being forced to see their colleague's leg hair."

From "Tokyo urges men to wear shorts to work, but some women say it's 'leg hair harassment'" (BBC).

Akifumi Funatsu, the director of Gorilla Clinic, says he has noticed more clients coming to the clinic not just for cosmetic reasons, but as a matter of "social etiquette when wearing shorts." He thinks women believe that "men should have less leg hair," which has prompted them to seek laser hair removal so as not to offend those around them.

Gorilla Clinic — I get it. A man is a gorilla if he's hairy. The BBC is reporting on a survey taken by this men's hair-removal business. Who came up with this idea that it's "harassment" to have to see a man's hairy legs in the office? I'm skeptical. It's just aesthetics. 

Anyway, as long as I'm talking about men in shorts, here's some video from the AC/DC concert last Sunday at Camp Randall, the UW football stadium a few blocks from our house. It was kind of funny to be lying in bed, falling asleep and hearing the live performance, which was pretty quiet by the time it reached our house:

"His alter ego on 'The Thick of It,' Stewart Pearson, was portrayed as a clownish figure who tries to push 'thought circles' on bewildered Tories and utters pablum like 'knowledge is porridge.'"

"The real Mr. Hilton became a larger-than-life figure, infamous among colleagues for walking the corridors of Downing Street shoeless and in shorts and proposing idiosyncratic ideas that made headlines, like using cloud-bursting technology to make Britain sunnier and abolishing maternity leave.... 'The actual policy proposal was to reduce the maternity to somewhere between six and four months; instead of the maximum yearlong leave in Britain, and to increase paternity leave, he said. 'A year is just way too long'.... By 2011, he became so widely known for his unconventional dress that American diplomats gave special instructions ahead of a visit from President Barack Obama. They said Mr. Hilton must either wear a suit or leave the building.... After being given a 'severe talking to,' she recalled, 'he did, in fact, put on proper clothes.' (Mr. Hilton remembered it differently. 'I think it was, "Yeah, you come to the meeting, you have to wear a suit." I was like, "Yeah, no, I don’t want to do that."') But it was Brexit, Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, that overshadowed Mr. Cameron’s tenure. Mr. Hilton was for it, and Mr. Cameron staked his career against it...."

From "He Was Satirized on British TV. Now He’s Trump’s Pick to Lead California. Steve Hilton grabbed headlines when he worked in conservative politics in Britain. His American political renaissance in the California governor’s race has bemused former British colleagues and rivals" (NYT).

"For the past few summers, men’s shorts have somehow been getting both shorter and longer."

"On one end, there’s the unmissable thigh-baring hemlines.... On the other side, you have the slouchier, below-the-knee joint.... [One fashion writer] cites that photo of Giorgio Armani on the phone as 'the Bible' for shorts right now. And then there’s the ongoing John F. Kennedy Jr. cosplay, as sparked by Love Story. 'Last summer, short shorts were everywhere. Now, a lot of men are like, "Oh, but JFK Jr. wore baggier shorts. Let’s ditch the short short...."' Of course, there will always be the extremes. Some guys prefer the ultra-trendy, downtown look of giant, capri-like shorts with white socks and black leather shoes.... But... 'In the city and polite society, you kind of want your shorts hovering right at the knee.'"

From "How Long (or Short) Should Your Shorts Be in 2026?/Here’s the definitive answer to the ultimate summer menswear debate" (GQ).

Who knew men were in such a quandary about the length of their shorts? One solution is don't wear shorts or don't wear shorts whenever you care how you look.

I'm interested in the notion that there is "ongoing John F. Kennedy Jr. cosplay" — interested enough to look up "cosplay" in the OED. Cosplay involves not just dressing up like a character but also performing as that character. Who would even know if you were performing the role of JFK Jr.? You'd know. And maybe that's all that matters.

Andy Dick and Bill Maher explain Biden to each other.

I like Dick's set up — "I don't know politics" — and then he does some nice physical comedy.

ADDED: This video has strong Man-in-Shorts content. I think the shorts work well for Dick. He's an odd little man, so shorts are fitting for him. He's not trying to convey the impression that he's A Man.

"I was walking with my girlfriend when we saw him. Shirtless, in late-afternoon sunlight, J.F.K., Jr., was playing Frisbee, wearing nothing but black athletic shorts..."

"... tennis shoes, and droopy white socks. This was the Ivy League. Nobody worked out. (Nobody I knew, anyway.) And so I wasn’t prepared for the muscularity, the anachronistic virility, on display. John’s physique was so classically ideal he might’ve been throwing a discus instead of a Frisbee and been carved out of stone. You looked for the defect in him and you couldn’t find it. There had to be something wrong somewhere, but it would take a magnifying glass to detect. Most of his clan had inherited the freckled, rabbity Kennedy looks. John, lucky in everything, had received the enhancing admixture of dark, French Mediterranean, Bouvier blood. I mentioned it was 1979. Bisexuality was undergoing one of its periodic upticks. I’d fallen into some confusion on that score myself. But I had a girlfriend now. That wasn’t what was going on. The urge I felt wasn’t to possess. It wasn’t even to resemble. It was to draw near. To be allowed to draw near...."

Writes Jeffrey Eugenides, in "My Unrequited Love Story with J.F.K., Jr./I knew John F. Kennedy, Jr., not that well and not that long, but enough to have experienced the gravitational pull he exerted, like some great big moon"
 (The New Yorker).

"What about sex dolls?"

Chris Williamson asks Dr. Debra Soh (who's got the perfect demeanor and speech style for talking about sex research):

A short tower of Reddit shavings.

1. "Babe wake up, they gerrymandered reincarnation."

2. "I live on my own right now and she saw my room and said it is an instant red flag."

3. It's mildly infuriating when the delivery guy takes that photo of the delivered package and includes your bare legs in the picture. Presumably, you were wearing shorts.

4. "Decorative tower in South Korean plastic surgery clinic made from the jawbones of patients who received plastic surgery for jawline reduction."

Bob Weir's "Bobby shorts" were NOT hot pants.

All respect to Bob Weir. My blog tribute to him is here. But now I need to talk about a NYT article that talks about his pants, his shorts. Here: "Bob Weir, a Virtuoso of Hot Pants/The Grateful Dead guitarist wore short shorts like no other" (NYT).

Okay, I am an expert on this subject... and not because I've been talking about the issue of men in shorts for 20 years. I was there, at ground zero, in the summer of 1971, when the "hot pants" fashion trend peaked. It was the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was 20 years old, and I worked — for what was probably less than $2 an hour — in the juniors department of Lit Brothers department store in Camden county, New Jersey. New hot pants outfits came in every week and we positioned them on the racks near the store entryway so they'd, presumably, mesmerize the passersby. I saw and handled this merchandise in real time. It was not made of denim. It was polyester. It was certainly not cut off and frayed. It had neatly finished edges. And most important, it had a 2-INCH INSEAM.

Now let's look at what that NYT is calling hot pants:

The article leans heavily into the idea that these shorts are really really shorty short. Key language: "chopped-to-the-heavens jean shorts," "Mr. Weir’s shorts were short," "snipped high enough that fans quite a distance from the stage could make out Mr. Weir’s upper thighs," "not Daisy Dukes, they were 'Bobby Shorts,'" "The Bob Weir Inseam... five inches max."

5 inches! 5 inches, you say?! Hot pants had a 2-INCH INSEAM! A woman in shorts with a 5-inch inseam would — in the era of hot pants — have been seen as frumpy and ultra-modest. 

Don't fight with me. I am a 1970s hot-pants purist. I was there. I didn't measure the inseam at the time, but I handled the merchandise, and I've researched the measurement, and the number is 2 inches. You may marvel — I'm marveling now — at how these pants could adequately enclose a woman's crotch, let alone a man's.

I am not taking one more step 'til I know where I'm going.

These men in shorts are exempt from any Althouse rule against men in shorts.

Photo taken on the ride back from the sunrise walk. It was 7:53 a.m. and the temperature was, perhaps, 20°.

"... 'soft-clubbing'... 'what happens when a generation raised on overstimulation and burnout wants the fun without the fatigue.' Think lo-fi coffee shop D.J. sets at 2 p.m...."

"... with everyone behaving a little too respectfully. Perhaps that explains the natural — or 'natty,' if you’ve been here a while — wine craze that has taken over New York’s restaurant and bar scene in the last couple of years, attracting 20-somethings looking to drink a little more 'intentionally.' And perhaps that’s how you get something called a wine rave at Public Records, a vast multilevel bar in Brooklyn, hosted by the D.J. collective Beverages on a Saturday afternoon. Here, finance bros in light blue linen button-ups and weathered Stan Smiths milled about clutching wine glasses, sediment occasionally pooling at the bottom."

From "Is Partying Dead, or Are You Just Old? Gen Z was alive during a week of supper clubs, daytime raves and rooftop ragers in New York City" (NYT).

Lots of photographs at the link, including the one I captured a segment of, because I've been keeping track of men (and women) in shorts:

I'll translate my feelings into a survey:

What do you think of young people going out "partying" dressed in shorts?

Only if you're "going out" to a friend's basement den or backyard.

Only if you look better because your bare legs are out in the open.

Only if it's part of an important heat-regulation strategy.

Only if they're all doing it because everyone else is.

Only if it happened to be what you already had on when you decided to leave the house.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"You know what Addison Ray said, taste is a privilege... I thought that it was one of the most elegant self-aware things that a pop star has ever said to me in an interview."

"She was locating herself as a person who, when she was 16, 17, 18, did not have access to a lot of cultural product outside the very obvious mainstream. Didn't know how or where to dig and had this kind of life force urge to get out of the circumstance that she was in. And in moments like that, you can't necessarily be like, I want to be artful, I want to be weird, I have unusual perspective. You're just like, how do I get outta here as fast as possible? The the speediest route and for her becoming a TikTok star and kind of being very relentless about like, I'm on every trending audio, anything that's, anything that's viral I'm participating in that was her speed run through the internet and now she's like, now I can have taste."

So said Jon Caramanica on yesterday's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily," which was titled "The Summer in Culture." (Transcript and audio at Podscribe.)

Caramanica he written about that interview back in June, in "TikTok Made Addison Rae Famous. Pop Made Her Cool. The onetime social media superstar has re-emerged as the most surprising rookie pop star of the year."

Annoyingly, the word "privilege" does not appear in the article. But I am seeing "taste is a luxury":

“When I reflect back on that time,” she said, “I’ve recognized how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury. I was definitely strategic with it.... It was a lot about like, ‘How am I just going to get out of here?’ It wasn’t about like, ‘Let me show the intricacies of myself right now.’” Pursuing her own taste, whatever that might have been, wasn’t an option — “a sacrifice that had to be made,” she said.

"Luxury" and "privilege" are not synonyms, but the slippage from "luxury" to "privilege" seems to have occurred in the mind of Caramanica. What is the more interesting idea — "Taste is a privilege" or "Taste is a luxury"? "Taste is a luxury" seems more like what it looks like it means in context: She was in a hurry. "Taste is a privilege" sounds more like something they'd teach about in a fancy college, full of deep political and sociological meaning. "Taste is a privilege" is a luxury for those who are not in a hurry.

ADDED AFTERTHOUGHT: Someone in a hurry could use AI to impose taste on a musical composition.

***

Also in that podcast is some "discourse" — they call it that — about shorts. My old topic: Men in shorts.

"Dunn was an international affairs specialist in the criminal division of the Justice Department, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters."

I'm reading "Man who threw sandwich at law enforcement was DOJ employee, Bondi says/Police allege that the man approached law enforcement officers, including Metro Transit Police and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, and began yelling obscenities" (WaPo).

U ST NW MAN THROWS SUB SANDWICH AT OFFICER: "The defendant was repeatedly yelling, cursing and berating an officer within inches of his face and ultimately assaulted him. He was arrested and the charge of assault of a police officer will be filed in district court tomorrow… pic.twitter.com/0mmJvdIVba

— Allison Papson (@AllisonPapson) August 13, 2025

"This is the product of a bunch of hacky bad millennial writers sitting around in a room trying to think of something quirky that two Gen X past their prime comedians can do to appeal to Zoomers on TikTok, even though their actual audience is baby boomers."

Said Matt Walsh, on his podcast yesterday, trashing a Jimmy Fallon "Tonight Show" sketch:

 

And I liked this — at 00:30:32 in the link above — about cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show: "There's a lot of speculation that Colbert got canned by CBS for criticizing Trump too much, which is, I mean, total nonsense.... If you're firing somebody because you don't like what they're saying... you're not gonna give them another year on the air... to, you know, with nothing to lose... to continue criticizing Trump. It doesn't make a lot of sense." 

Giving Colbert 10 more months to speak seems to mean that CBS is not trying to silence him and probably is cancelling him for the reason it's giving: money. I would add that it also seems to mean that it wants even more speech from Colbert — much harsher, more aggressive attacks on Trump. CBS lit a fire under Colbert and turned him loose to express himself without the need to preserve the show.

That prompted me to prompt Grok like this: What are some movies where a character finds out he has only a short time left to live and because of the awareness of his compressed life span, he finds far greater meaning tha[n] had been available to him when he was rolling along living life as if death was only vaguely hovering about in the fog of the seemingly distant future? Obviously, there's "Ikiru." There's "Dark Victory." But there must be a thousand. Help me expand this list. (Grok's answer.)

In short — in jort — I think CBS wants the opposite of silence from Colbert. It wants bigger, broader, more stabbingly painful satire... even as it also must stop hemorrhaging money.

"Yet dandyism is all about refusal — of fixed identities, of mediocrity, of gender conventions, of the boundary between life and art. "

"Dandyism blends literary and artistic creation with the art of personality, the careful cultivation of image and behavior.... Many tend to associate dandyism with white, European aesthetes of earlier centuries — men like Beau Brummell, Lord Byron, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde — who often produced art or literature, but also produced themselves: making social waves not by dint of noble birth, but through their carefully constructed personas, ironic wit and impeccable dress. Although less recognized, Black dandyism also dates to the 18th century.... At his Chelsea apartment and studio, Mr. Udé greeted me in one of his signature looks: pale khaki Bermuda shorts; vintage white oxfords; a fitted beige cotton blazer, discreetly striped in black and red; a crisp white shirt; and a silk neckerchief in chartreuse, black and red. As ever, Mr. Udé’s hair rose in two hemispheres of springy curls, parted in the middle, giving the effect of a bifurcated crown...."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "America’s Premier Living Dandy Doesn’t Want the Title/The artist Iké Udé understands the power of rejecting labels" (NYT).

Did you know dandyism was a current issue (and a matter of serious historical study)?

My reference point:

BONUS: As long as we're in the mid-60s and the name Beau Brummel has been invoked:

About those shorts.

Link.