If You Wear These “Short Suits” For Business Or Socializing, You Deserve To Be Homeless And Alone

Rob Fox10 years ago

If you’ve been looking for the easiest way to get someone to reach across his desk and punch you in the face during a job interview but you don’t have sexual access to his spouse, look no further, because modern fashion has your answer: the short suit!

Combining the style of a suit and the comfort of shorts, with the same level of appropriateness one could combine the savoriness of prime rib with the refreshment of a Slurpee, the short suit is here to get you noticed…for being an unrepentant, oblivious tool.

A recent Business Insider story claims the short suit is “going mainstream” and points out that popular retailers, including J.Crew and Barney’s, have several short suits in their catalogs, the pages on which they’re advertised no doubt amounting to the fashion equivalent of the “Alien: Resurrection” genetic disaster lab. (Somewhere there’s a floral, patterned short suit laying on a table, gasping to its designer, “Kill me. Kill meee.”) Meanwhile, Jon Patrick, the creative director at J.Hilburn, tells Business Insider of the short suit, “It’s definitely having a moment, particularly with younger guys.”

Being in Austin, Texas, which is quite possibly the business casual capital of the world–I’m pretty sure anesthesiologists wear jeans and T-shirts to work here–the only short suit I’ve ever seen was being worn ironically on a pedicab driver who had a beard as long as his inseam. Suffice it to say, I have no idea what’s sweeping the streets of New York, D.C., L.A., Chicago, and so on, though I do feel fairly confident in assuming that if you walked into business meeting in Dallas sporting a short suit, all the bros in the room would give you a swirly before taking you outside and hoisting you up a flagpole by your underwear.

That said, I’m guessing the short suit is actually not having a substantial “moment” at all, unless it’s now appropriate to show up to work dressed like a 5-year-old ring bearer at a gay, summer wedding. Outside of Professional Easter Egg Hunt Umpires and AC/DC, the short suit doesn’t belong at any place of work. Even Grandex’s CEO, Madison Wickham, weighed in on the outfit, saying, “I mean, what business would accept this as appropriate attire? You can wear pretty much whatever you want at Grandex, but if someone showed up in a shorts suit I did probably tell them to go home and change.” This is coming from a man who witnesses a parade of shambly, hungover filth shuffling into his office every Friday morning.

The short suit and its 12 proponents have a better argument fitting into social settings than professional ones–after all, people can wear whatever they want in their free time. Even still, just no. Wear what you want, but I defy any normal looking heterosexual male to close on a non-hipster female while dressed like some sort of Nantucket Joffrey. Furthermore, enduring the same questions and comments about your short suit over and over again, from strangers and friends alike, would be miserable. And this is all coming from a pretty shameless dresser. I own a seersucker suit. I wear a bow tie at every appropriate opportunity, if only to remind everyone that, yes, I can tie a bow tie, and yes, that does make me slightly better than you. On top of that, I have fantastic calves. They’re beautiful, dammit; two ivory pythons. But despite all that, there’s absolutely no way you would ever catch me dead in (or paying $400 plus for) a short suit. Not unless I was going as the frontman of AC/DC for Halloween, anyway.

Hard pass on the short suit, even as a pledge uniform.

[via Business Insider]