The shorts discourse has evolved at men’s fashion week in Paris. “It’s literally a tale of two hemlines,” said Bruce Pask, the senior director for men’s fashion at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus, while browsing the ERL collection at the Dover Street Market showroom on Saturday. They were either really short or really long. They’re nothing like the tapered chino-like Everyman styles that your brother-in-law wears to mow the lawn.
The short of spring 2026 is sexy.
It came into focus at Saint Laurent, where Anthony Vaccarello opened the show with an orange shirt and matching tie tucked into its buttons with a pair of brown shorts — pleated, neatly cuffed and wide, as if a pair of dress pants had been lopped off at the upper quad. Boxy little numbers were also on display at Ami, Kenzo, Wales Bonner and LGN Louis Gabriel Nouchi.
In Milan, Prada’s men’s runway was awash in bunchy, blousy, patch-pocket bloomers. No one expects such a style to be embraced by the masses, but it serves as an extreme to retrain the eye.
“It’s the new miniskirt,” said Alex Badia, the style director of Women’s Wear Daily.
The long and the short of it was embodied at ERL, infused with the beachtown vibe of Venice Beach, Calif., where the designer Eli Russell Linnetz is based. For his spring collection, Mr. Linnetz concocted a story of envy and obsession between two male classmates at an elite boarding school, casting two collegiate-looking models to play the dirty and preppy parts. A sun-bleached blond wore a pair of baggy, pleated khakis hemmed about four inches above the knee. A shaggy brunet wore baggy, pleated khakis cut off about three inches below the knee. Similar lengths were shown at Lemaire and Homme Plissé Issey Miyake.
Which shorts were the ERL models most likely to wear in real life? “Longer.”
Beka Gvishiani, the man behind the popular fashion Instagram account Style Not Com, wore a pair of long, but still above the knee, Hermès shorts — the first item he had ever purchased from the brand — to its spring men’s show. In a season full of shorts, Véronique Nichanian, the artistic director of Hermès men’s wear, did not have a single pair to spare on her runway.
“Why no shorts?” Mr. Gvishiani asked point-blank backstage.
“Too many last time,” Ms. Nichanian answered.
In fact, she had started the new collection with a bunch of shorts and decided to cancel them all. “I preferred to have white pants,” she said. Mr. Gvishiani theorized that when everyone was doing one thing, Hermès did the opposite.
Hermès generally exists in a higher dimension, floating above trends, sluggish markets and possibly even climate change. It was extremely hot in Paris, but the Hermès models appeared to occupy a different air space than the wilting audience did. They floated by lighter and fresher than any living creature wearing leather jackets and pants, some in intricate woven latticework and jaunty fringed scarves in an 82-degree room with no air-conditioning.
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