In the late 1970s, Bob Weir, a guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, whose death at 78 was announced on Saturday, first appeared in chopped-to-the-heavens jean shorts. They left an indelible impression. Into middle age, Mr. Weir was still answering for this abbreviated stagewear.
“I have always had a certain aversion to heat. And for me, the name of the game on the stage is ‘beat the heat,’” he said in a 2014 interview with Vanity Fair. “It’s always July under the lights. And after a while, I got just good and goddamned tired of it. So, shorts.”
To be certain, Mr. Weir’s shorts were short. They were spliced high enough that fans quite a distance from the stage could make out Mr. Weir’s upper thighs. Shy about skin he was not.
Mr. Weir’s severed shorts became a piece of Dead lore. Cutoff shorts to Deadheads were not Daisy Dukes, they were “Bobby Shorts.” And, to certain admirers (even those who wouldn’t know “Morning Dew” from Mountain Dew), Mr. Weir claimed a place beside Sean Connery and Magnum P.I. as a man admirably unafraid to flaunt some leg.
So known were Mr. Weir’s shorts that, in 2008, when he and the Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart held a news conference to announce that the band’s archive was being donated to the University of California at Santa Cruz, the guitarist addressed if that included his cutoffs.
“Those particular shorts could be included in the archive,” Mr. Weir said, according to an article in SF Weekly, though he cautioned that the shorts by then had pretty much been rendered unwearable from years of use.
If Jerry Garcia was the Dead’s papa bear in conventional T-shirts and a shaggy Santa beard, Mr. Weir was more conspicuously stylish. It helped that Mr. Weir, a comely Northern Californian with shoulder-length blond hair, was the closest thing his psych-rock band had to a heartthrob.
During the 1980s, Mr. Weir regularly dressed like a diagram in the “The Official Preppy Handbook.” He wore his nipped shorts sandwiched between sun-faded polos and New Balance sneakers. His style, so similar to what J. Crew would package in years to come, suited a band whose fans often began as hippies only to molt into yuppies.
(Mr. Weir didn’t appear to view preppiness as derogatory. In a 2019 interview with GQ about his style, when one of Mr. Weir’s daughters described the polos as his “inner frat boy coming out,” Mr. Weir agreed.)
“He was a little more straightforward stylistically,” said Josh Peskowitz, the former men’s fashion director at Bloomingdale’s and a lifelong Grateful Dead fan. Mr. Peskowitz added that there was always more to Mr. Weir’s style. His shorts, after all, looked as if they’d been chopped with a butter knife.
“That’s how he subverted a look that would have otherwise been preppy,” Mr. Peskowitz said. “The shorts were like, ‘this stuff ain’t that serious.’”
However frayed his hems were, Mr. Weir’s plucky comfort with having his upper thighs exposed made him an unforeseen style icon. Whenever trends would dictate men’s shorts hiding the knee, you could count on someone saying that men should dress like Bobby instead.
“It takes guts to wear these shorts,” the men’s fashion blog Red Clay Soul proclaimed back in 2013, in a post titled “The Bob Weir Inseam,” which advised that men should mimic the guitarist and wear shorts that were “five inches max.”
For his part, Mr. Weir appeared to revel in the recognition for his attire. When Vogue described him as a fashion icon for wearing Birkenstocks, Mr. Weir reshared the article on his Facebook page. When Levi’s collaborated with the Grateful Dead in 2021, Mr. Weir appeared in a video to market the collection.
Still, it was those cutoffs he seemed most proud of.
“I didn’t have to follow any trends,” Mr. Weir told GQ in 2019 when reflecting on the shorts. “I could sort of start making my own.”
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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