A Short History of the Swim Short
The garment we make had to be legalized. This is not a metaphor.
In 1916, the city beaches on Chicago’s Lake Michigan set out how a man could dress for the water. A suit could sit no lower on the chest than the armpits. Bottoms could rise no more than four inches above the knee, and needed a skirt effect over the trunks, or a long shirt worn over the top. The alternative was flannel knee pants, a belt, and a vest. Cities up and down both coasts wrote their own versions. Getting it wrong was not a fashion problem. It was an arrest for indecent exposure.
So for the first decades of the century, men swam in wool, in one-piece suits that drank half the sea on the way out of it. The twenties loosened the cut but not the rules. Then the thirties arrived with two weapons: stretch yarn, which let a suit actually fit, and Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic swimmer turned Tarzan, who lent his name to a line of standalone trunks. America was not ready yet.
America came around the hard way. Men kept stripping the tops off anyway, and kept getting arrested for it, on public beaches from Atlantic City to Galveston. In the summer of 1936, the protests organized into what the papers called the no-shirt movement. By 1937 the holdouts were giving in, and trunks alone were becoming legal on the American beach.
Which means the swim short, as a garment a man can simply wear, is not yet a hundred years old. It is younger than the zipper it sometimes carries. Everything since has been refinement: the postwar boxer cut, the loud cabana sets of the fifties, the brief, the boardshort, and the long correction back toward the tailored mid-length this house has chosen.
We build at the end of that story, and the lesson we take from it is the original one. The men of 1936 were not fighting for a garment. They were fighting for less garment: for the right to meet the water without unnecessary cloth. Reduction was the founding act of this category. A pair of shorts, cut to move, in a fabric the sea cannot bully. It took two decades of argument and arrest to allow it. The least we can do is make it properly.
