SIMON MILLS: At 60, can I pull off skimpy short shorts à la Paul Mescal and Harry Styles?

Daily Mail​

19-07-2025

I am standing in front of the sun-dappled, pine-tree boulevard that leads to the five-star Bellevue Hotel in Lošinj, Croatia, trying my best to pull off what fashionable, Instagramming men are now calling the ' Harrison Ford Short Shorts' shot.
My version (right) involves a long-sleeved navy-blue merino crew neck, a pair of beaten-up brown leather deck shoes, aviator sunglasses and dark-blue shorts, crucially with an inseam less than four inches. With exposed knees, calves and thighs, the look has the same bare-legged swagger that miniskirts instilled in Chelsea girls during the swinging 60s.
This now-iconic (and much imitated on Instagram) Ford image was snapped at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in the South of France, during the Cannes Film Festival, back in 1982 when the Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark actor was a ruggedly handsome 39-year-old. In the picture he looks bronzed and sporty – a bona-fide film star (whose Blade Runner was about to be released) but also still very much the effortlessly hip, pot-smoking California carpenter dude.
And his shorts are short. Wimbledon Centre Court short. Kevin Keegan circa the Spanish World Cup 1982 short. This was the way men dressed for the warm months back then.
Following the lead of other 80s summer style icons – Tom Selleck as Magnum PI, tennis player Björn Borg, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley from Wham! in their badminton-ready Filas – shorts were styled to compliment the super thigh-guy decade of body-consciousness, step aerobics and Jazzercise. Men wanted to look fit, healthy, tanned and leggy. The hamstring was an erogenous zone.
And now they're back, helped by Ford's cross-generational influence, Josh O'Connor's sweaty but desirable dirtbag tennis player style in the sexually charged Challengers movie and the leg-focused deadlifts, lunges and squats fast taking over from ab crunches and bicep curls in the gym. The past two or three summers have seen a vibe shift, moving the inseam of men's shorts in an audaciously upward direction.
Back in Croatia, your reporter is examining his attempt at the famous Harrison Ford Short Shorts shot. Oh dear. Some intense sessions in the gym are needed. Lunges, squats, curls, maybe that hip-abductor machine thing. And those dark-blue Sundek shorts I'm wearing? Yes, for a middle-aged dad who has spent the past two decades in Bermudas and board shorts, they do feel short to me. But with summer 2025 hotting up, they need to be shorter. Hard to believe in the slobby 21st century, I know.
With one in four adult Brits now obese, as soon as the temperature climbs into the 20s, men more commonly reach for 'shorts' that extend way over the knee and have the voluminous proportions of culottes. With bellies to hide and calf tattoos to show off, it has now become socially (if not aesthetically) acceptable for dads on holiday to wear oversized cargo shorts or even those heinous, clam-digger length abominations, pockets bulging with mobile phone and wallet.
But new designer collections are dominated by short shorts with versions by Gucci, Hermès and Dior all channelling John Travolta in the 1985 movie Perfect. Celebrities including Paul Mescal, Harry Styles, Pharrell Williams, Jeremy Allen White and Donald Glover have been snapped chasing the summer high of a five- or four-inch inseam.
The fashion is going mainstream with even Marks & Spencer's shorts now shorter, more tailored and thigh-minded. Its latest summer campaign, fronted by Mark Wright and Spencer Matthews, asks customers if they're ready for a 'thigh-guy summer'. What's more, a survey from the brand reports 66 per cent of men liking the 'short shorts' trend, with an incredible 76 per cent saying they feel more body confident than ever before and 46 per cent planning on purchasing a pair this summer.
'The biggest flex at the moment isn't a designer item. It is your body,' says Robbie Williams' stylist Luke Day, himself a seasoned, short shorts pioneer. 'Men want to show how hard they have been working out.'
Orlebar Brown, the British label launched in 2007, has elevated shorts and swimmers to the rank of tailored garments (and gained a 24-carat brand ambassador in Daniel Craig's James Bond in Skyfall) by hoiking up shorts to vertiginous heights and reducing inseams. Male customers in the flamboyant Mykonos/South Beach Miami/Ibiza triangle proved early adopters.
During Orlebar Brown's early seasons, co-founder Adam Brown recalls a creative moodboard that included images of Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, JFK on his yacht, Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii and Sean Connery rocking a teeny towelling shorts onesie in Goldfinger. Still, fearing that going 'Chalamet-short' too quickly would be a mistake, he initially suggested testing the water with four different inseam lengths, ranging from the Dane style, which are a relatively safe nine inches, to the thigh-positive Springer, a skimpy three inches.
At first customers played it safe with the longer lengths. Now, with every passing summer, the preferred shorts get shorter, with the upper-quad-grazing Springer becoming increasingly popular while longer cuts are harder to shift.
'Men used to think it was OK to look sloppy, cheap and uncool when they were on holiday,' says Brown. 'Normal sartorial rules didn't seem to apply.' Baggy board shorts, designed for willowy Florida teenagers, were co-opted by tubby middle-aged Brits, apparently unaware that their vacation attire was garish, ugly and infantilising.
'Rather than let themselves go, we wanted men to actually dress for their holiday,' adds Brown. 'We made shorts that you could swim in and then have lunch in, or wear on a walk into town for some shopping.'
Skimpy shorts caught on, nowhere more so than on the football pitch. During the past few seasons, football shorts have edged into Speedo-ish hotpants territory, with players like Lukas Podolski, Neymar, Alexis Sánchez and Jack Grealish affecting an 80s-style, nigh-on illegal, tuck on their shorts for training.
Fifa's kit rule book is very prescriptive on shirts but offers no restrictions on shorts, giving players like Cristiano Ronaldo permission to yank his shorts up ballet-dancer high on his shredded thighs to showcase his impressive quads. A consequence of this radical styling is that Ronaldo may be the first-ever professional male footballer to display camel toe during the run up to a penalty kick. Grealish copied the look… often with just one shorts leg rolled up. (Nope, me neither.)
On the tennis courts – Wimbledon and the French Open being the shorts equivalent of Paris Fashion Week – Jannik Sinner's Borg-length cutaway Nikes and Lorenzo Musetti's muscle-mary-ish kits by Asics x APC have counted as key moments in tennis style evolution.
Gentleman tennis fan Jeremy Hackett, founder of the eponymous Hackett menswear and a holidays-only shorts-wearer himself, is mostly approving but also cautious of the trend. 'Every summer Hackett sells thousands of pairs of quite conservative, mostly mid-length shorts. But, yes, we have seen seams rising in the past few summers,' he says.
There is, however, a 'but' here.
'A big butt, actually,' says Hackett.
'Anyone who has a waist larger than 32 inches should avoid them. Short shorts suit a slight frame. You need to be slim and tanned. A six-foot plus frame will help. And great legs, of course.'