I hate your jorts

It's not illegal to show some thigh btw

This is a rejected Hate Read submission but I am so filled with hate about it that I had to publish anyway, in hopes of finding fellow jorts haters and maybe even getting through to jorts wearers.

Last summer our already fragile culture was struck by another pandemic: knee length jorts. The most fashionable girls I know IRL and follow online have spent the past year walking around in baggy, mostly low waisted, knee-grazing, denim monstrosities. And I’m sick of it! They’re fugly and I hate seeing them! When André Leon Talley described American fashion as a famine of beauty, he was talking prophetically about knee length jorts. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but when you wear these you look like you’d call your mom a bitch to her face because she told you not to light things on fire in the backyard. Every day, gorgeous people step into a pair of knee length jorts and immediately look like a 12 year old named Kyle that’s addicted to Monster energy drinks he steals from his local 7-11. Even the word “jorts” is hideous in the way it clunkily falls out of your mouth.

And before you say “I bet you like them when Bella Hadid wears them!” nope! Not true! I am an equal opportunity jorts hater! When Bella Hadid wears these I pound my fist on the table and scream in anguish to the fashion gods for one of her more beautiful outfits. Bella Hadid, like everyone else, looks like she has detention after school today for throwing a chair at her 2nd period teacher when she wears knee length jorts. This is not a case of being skinny enough or beautiful enough to pull them off - they’re just ugly and they look bad on everyone. In fact, I’ve seen exactly one person make knee length jorts look good - fashion editor and stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson once posted an IG story of her wearing them that stopped me in my tracks and made me question my belief. Wait, I thought to myself. Do I actually like jorts?

But no. I do not. After a few moments of contemplation I realized she is simply the exception that proves the rule - her looking good in them just highlights how bad everyone else looks in them. I can’t even really pinpoint why they look so much better on her than on everyone else - they just do.

come on….like be so serious right now….

I’ve spent some time thinking about the political subtext beneath the rise in long, baggy shorts - the clothes we live in are a reflection of the times we live in, after all. Are knee length jorts a right-coded, modesty thing? Are they a left-leaning rebellion against conventional beauty; a modern manrepeller? I believe they’re mostly intended to be the latter based on the primarily Bushwick-based (physically or spiritually) people I see gravitating towards them, but given the rise of conservatism and anti-sex, modesty based culture, I don’t think they entirely escape the shadow of the former. My leftist mind tells me that any clothes that people are comfortable in are good, that comfortable shorts allow for a range of movement that more restrictive clothes do not, and that that is inherently freeing. But my aesthetically inclined heart aches for something that allows for that freedom and is also beautiful. I’m not even rooting for a return to Hollister-esque tiny shorts, but surely there’s something in between! Surely the mid-thigh jorts of the ‘80s allow for the same feeling of freedom, while also being much hotter! It’s not illegal to show a bit of thigh!

Ultimately, everyone can and should wear what they want - it’s really not my business what you wear, I’m just being a hater. But I will continue being a hater - your freedom to dress as you want that doesn’t mean I have to pretend it’s stylish or looks good. I feel like I’m being punked seeing them being lauded in publications like Grazia, Refinery29, and even Vogue: “all the cool girls are wearing jorts” is a real thing people are saying and also something plucked directly from my most visceral nightmares. I’m praying that this was just a fleeting sartorial blemish that came about in the drug addled haze of Brat summer, but based on the images coming out of the first few warm days of the year, I fear they’re here to stay for at least another year.

I know they’re just in fashion right now, that they’re the natural, pendulum swinging response to the teeny, tiny miniskirt trend of the few summers before. And I know that fashion is prone to have some widely loved duds, and that eventually knee length jorts will cycle out and everyone will be like “lol remember when we all wore knee length jorts? Yikes!” I just wish we were there already. I look forward to those days and will welcome them with open arms as I say that I, for one, did not wear knee length jorts. Pretty soon secondhand stores will be filled with knee length jorts, when everyone wakes up from their baggy denim psychosis after they put on their knee length jorts one day and say, oh - what the fuck? These are ugly! And I will say yes they are! They are so ugly!