Summer Fashions Recommended by People Who Don't Have Your Best Interests at Heart

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Anyone who tells you to wear a shorts suit is not your friend. That goes double for anyone who recommends wearing seersucker. And yet, two stories today pointed to the return of both trends: Business Insider pointed out the rise of the $400 shorts suit, and according to The Washington Post our elected representatives in Congress want to bring back seersucker Fridays. 

Early adopters of the shorts suit like Sen. Rand Paul know that the trend involved wearing a fitted suit, but pretending you couldn't afford that lower half of the pants. And given that the "stylish" ones cost between $300 and $900, maybe you couldn't. Businessweek first reported on suit shorts on Friday, calling them "equal parts business and schoolboy." “It’s definitely having a moment, particularly with younger guys,” Jon Patrick, the creative director of a menswear company that doesn't sell shorts suits, said. So if you too want to look like a stylish 20-something and expose your calves to clients and wedding guests while still wearing a stuffy suit jacket, be our guests. Just know you likely won't have a future in conservative blogging: 

Pretty easy decision for me. I’d fire an employee who came in wearing a suit with shorts.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) June 9, 2014

But you might have a future in Congress, where fashion consists of wearing blue seersucker suits on the third Thursday in June. The Senate tradition, which went from 1996 until 2012, has been a kind of bipartisan fashion faux pas, used to bring both parties together. In 2004, Sen. Dianne Feinstein bought all of the female senators suits, "breaking the glass ceiling of a male-dominated celebration." We'd argue that wearing seersucker is a glass ceiling neither gender should break. 

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.