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

Anyone who tells you to wear a shorts suit is not your friend. That goes double for anyone who recommends wearing seersucker.

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.

Pro-tip: Don't wear socks with your shorts suit. (J Crew)

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.