FFS – For Fashion’s Sake – is a column that picks the threads of directional, divisive menswear. From the omnihype of luxury streetwear to the foibles of designers’ trippiest fever dreams, these are the bleeding-edge trends to cop or scoff at right now. This month: short shorts.

FFS – For Fashion’s Sake – is a column that picks the threads of directional, divisive menswear. From the omnihype of luxury streetwear to the foibles of designers’ trippiest fever dreams, these are the bleeding-edge trends to cop or scoff at right now. This month: short shorts.

As a pre-teen, I had a teacher – a Mr Martin, coincidentally – who was one of those endemically British types of men who never actually served in the forces, but carried on throughout his life as if he’d been at Port Stanley. He was a man who believed in queen, country, good posture, cross country and hands out of pockets.

“Tuck your shirts in please gentlemen, you’re not rappers are you?” I distinctly remember him saying to me and a couple of friends as we hung about the corridor. He ran the school ‘adventure club’, preferred rugby to football, liked to recite a proverb or two and owned a canoe.

He was, all in all, a fairly conservative kind of bloke. But there was one strange mark on his character, an unlikely aesthetic chink in his armour, one fatal concession to flamboyance and silliness: he wore really, really short shorts.

This would have been the late 90s, but his shorts were from a different time altogether – the time of Steve Cram, Zola Budd, Geoff Capes and Gregory’s Girl. They were invariably made by obscure British sports brands whose names have long fallen into the charity shop ether. They stuck to the upper part of his thighs like newly applied wallpaper, with just enough give in the arse to cope with a yomp up the Brecon Beacons, and enough slack in the crotch to stop the child protection services coming in for a school visit.