Here is the fashion discourse you did not know you were missing: are shorts even shorts anymore? Or have we, as a society, quietly agreed to start wearing culottes and just... not tell anyone?
Highsnobiety's Shopper newsletter dropped this spicy little take in its April 28 edition, and honestly, it deserves way more chaos than it generated. Because they are right. Look at what is actually selling right now. Look at what the cool people are wearing. Those wide-leg, mid-thigh, floaty-bottomed things are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the "shorts" category and they are absolutely not shorts in the traditional sense.
So what even is a short anymore?
The classic definition is simple enough - leg coverage that stops before the knee. But the silhouette that is dominating right now borrows heavily from culotte DNA. Wide cuts, relaxed fabric, a certain... drama of movement that regular shorts simply do not possess. Your cargo shorts from 2009 did not billow. These things billow.
And that billow is doing something important. It is making shorts feel elevated, occasion-appropriate, and frankly a little bit Italian vacation even when you are just grabbing an iced coffee two blocks from your apartment.
Why this actually matters
This is not just a semantics argument for people who care too much about fashion vocabulary (though hello, that is also us). It points to something bigger happening in menswear and womenswear simultaneously - the blurring of garment categories in pursuit of comfort and versatility.
The best pieces right now refuse to be easily filed away. Is it a short? A culotte? A very confident trouser that gave up halfway? The answer is yes, and that ambiguity is precisely the point.
When a garment can read as relaxed and polished at the same time, it wins. Full stop. The shorts-that-are-basically-culottes pipeline is just the latest example of fashion figuring out that rigid category rules are boring and the real flex is making something that works everywhere.
The verdict
If you are shopping for shorts this season and you keep gravitating toward the wider, longer, floatier options - congratulations, you have been culotte-pilled and there is no going back. Embrace it. Your knees will be controversial and your outfits will be excellent.
Highsnobiety's Shopper team called it, and we are fully co-signing. The best shorts right now are doing the most, and what they are doing is quietly being culottes the whole time.
