https://flashbak.com/i-think-youve-forg ... ty-407244/
I don't know about women's fashion, but I keep seeing a trend in history that for real change to happen with men's styles, it has to have some external force rather than from within. It seems great turning points are wars, revolutions, and big events that shape the world.A major shift in men’s clothing didn’t happen until after the war, when new fabrics and the rise of American style, with its preoccupation with leisure-wear, radically changed men’s appearances in the 1960s.
Ii think also it can give those of us nervous folk strength to know that men have gone through this before:
A man wearing shorts to play tennis looks utterly normal these days, but in the early 1930s it attracted much derision. John Kieran wrote about Austin in the New York Times that year:
Austin actually had to overcome considerable embarrassment when he decided to wear shorts for the first time and it wasn’t an easy decision:With his white linen hat and his flannel shorts, the little English player looked like an AA Milne production.
I myself took over two years to summon up enough courage to wear shorts, although for years I had known how much more healthy, comfortable and reasonable they were for tennis. I hovered in my bedroom…putting them on, taking them off, putting them on again, wrestling with the problem of Hamlet – ‘to be or not to be’. At last I summoned up all my courage, put and kept them on, and waring an overcoat to conceal them as much as possible, went out of the hotel to play. My bare legs protruded beneath the coat and I slunk through the lounge self-consciously. As I passed through the door an agitated porter followed me. ‘Excuse me, Mr Austin’, he whispered diffidently, ‘but I think you’ve forgotten your trousers.