It's A Southern Thing

Wow, can you imagine such starlets as Katharine Hepburn wearing pants out in public gatherings. I can just hear the conservative South expressing their opinion about women wearing pants, let alone shorts and, oh my goodness, short shorts. What would the world come to when women of the 1930’s started wearing short shorts.

Even though the fashion manufacturers of the day were making short shorts for the ladies to wear they didn't really take off, but they did hang around, because I do remember all the cute girls back in our day wearing those wonderful short shorts. Oh, what lucky guys we were. Do you remember short shorts and when they got popular and why they got popular. Well, I have a little story to tell you. Like I said, shorts for women have been around at least since the 1930’s and they started getting pretty popular in the 1940’s. This is the story of why they got popular and why I call it a southern thing.

You see, it all started back when the Second World War broke out in Europe, and things got even worse when the Japanese ventured into the war, because our sources of silk became stretched to say the least. Any stockpiles of silk or nylon were going toward the war effort for such things as parachutes. So, what was a young lady of the late 30’s and 40’s to do. No stockings, oh my goodness. This must have been a blow to all the girl watchers out there as well. Never fear though, these young ladies came up with some great ideas.

Meanwhile, in the conservative South, women were working in the fields and on the farms and in the factories. White women worked in the fields and on the farms because their men were now in Europe and Asia fighting in the Second World War did their best not to get an all over tan. As a matter fact, they tried to cover up from head to toe because no genteel Southern lady wanted anyone to know that they were a common woman and worked in the fields. That's why you still saw women in the fields wearing either pants or long skirts and they were adorned with floppy hats to keep their face from getting tanned. So, when the supply of nylon stockings ran out in the South, what were the conservative women of the South to do. I'll tell you what they did, they started wearing short shorts and allowing their legs to be tanned so that they would look as if they were wearing stockings. Why some were even so bold that they painted a line down their leg with dark mascara to make it look like they were wearing seamed stockings, because that's how stockings were made in those days. The adoption of short shorts became popular in the South during leisure activities, oh my, what was Aunt Betty Lou to think of her girls. The South was turned on its ear to think that just a few years ago everyone was up in arms because women started wearing pants instead of skirts Nowadays, it's almost impossible to find women wearing skirts, sorry as the days of girl watching has gotten a little less leggy, if you are a leg man.

Things had progressed a little bit by the time we had gotten to the 1960’s where the go-go dancers in cages were all wearing short shorts, and doing all of those 60’s dances.

Girl watchers were in hog heaven. All of the trendy and mod young ladies were adorned with some of the shortest shorts ever seen up to that time. I know because I lived in that era and you can't tell me those shorts were not short. Starlets like Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch made short shorts part of every girls fashion wardrobe from the late 60’s, through the 70’s when they were known as hot pants and on into the 1980’s.

Young ladies of the South had improvised since day one when they found out that they could wear shorts, because one of the most popular pieces of apparel for Southerners were denim jeans, better known as blue jeans. These fashion conscious southern lasses had been cutting off their blue jeans and wearing them as shorts and allowing them to fray around the legs for a few years before a television show known as The Dukes of Hazard came about and actress Catherine Bach made showing her legs in short cut off blue jeans fraying around the legs popular for an entire nation. And believe me, at my age in those days I had no complaints about it all.

Yes, ever since those Southern girls allowed themselves to be comfortable and decided that shorts were okay to wear and flying those shorts in the face of all the detractors at the time, so to speak, made it possible for short shorts to become popular and the trend seems to pop up about every 10 years or so for the pleasure of all the girl watchers out there, like myself.

You see, I don't believe without the adoption of the southern women wearing shorts in the South, the short shorts would have never been so popular. That's my story of why I call it a southern thing, and I'm sticking to it.