Young Girl In Shorts

• Short shorts
By the mid-1950s, post-WWII Americans were beginning to relax and enjoy both their new economic and baby booms as their offspring which were just entering their teens. Television and rock'n'roll captured taste and fashion, including the new "short shorts" fad, since Bermuda shorts were considered old, dull, and "fuddy-duddy" although, as History of Costume author and FIT Professor Rachel Kemper noted, "Short shorts left a girl's ass hanging out." The Royal Teens wrote and sang the song "Short Shorts" (1957) (in which "short shorts" is mentioned 18 times). That song was itself referred to in Sheb Wooley's song "Purple People Eater" song (1958). Short shorts also refers to the older style of tight basketball shorts which went upper-thigh worn by players until the 1990s, when looser shorts that went down to the knee became the norm. Many clothing vendors refer to 'short shorts' as having an inseam of four inches or less.
• Short trousers (British English) or school shorts
These are fully tailored and usually lined shorts with full zip fly and belt loops, in former times of flannel, nowadays of a cotton/synthetic mixture, typically in grey, worn by male primary and secondary school students as part of a formal school uniform in Britain, Australia, Singapore, South Africa and New Zealand, and also by Cub scouts. These were typically worn with long socks, or stockings (as they were known till 1960s) often also grey and often with coloured tops. They nowadays mostly reach down to the knee or even slightly further; from about 1960 until the 1980s they were generally much shorter, typically coming to about half way up the thigh when standing. In tailoring/menswear trade jargon (and colonial English) they are sometimes misleadingly called "knickers". Use of the word "knickers" reminds us that "shorts" for boys descended from "knickerbockers" which were commonly worn by boys in UK before the 1920s. Knickerbockers fell below the knee and were attached by buttons to stockings. In the 1920s knickerbockers gradually became shorter and lost their attachment to the stockings leaving the knee bare. Eventually, in effect, the knickerbockers turned into shorts and the stockings turned into turn-over knee stockings with coloured tops (after 1960s increasingly called knee-socks). Hence the new "shorts" were in the 1920s and 1930s (and even later) occasionally called "knickers" by old-fashioned outfitters. Some shorts even retained vestigial buttons reminding us that knickerbockers had been "buttoned" to stockings. But this name, "knickers" was never used among the ordinary public and least of all among schoolboys themselves, since "knickers" in British English had gradually come to refer to a kind of women's underwear and used to be regarded as a somewhat rude word.