Men’s Style|Go Ahead, Wear a Pair of High Black Socks With Those Shorts
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It's a Look
A look once typical of the style-challenged is suddenly fashionable.
Yes, it’s O.K. to wear socks — even high socks — with shorts.
The clues were there in fashion presentations for the spring 2017 season by labels from J. Crew to Dries Van Noten. Now that the weather has warmed up, stylish men are stepping out of their caves and into the light in a look that was once the garb of clueless tourists.
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Garret Munce, a sharp-eyed fashion editor at GQ, noticed it last summer around Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where many an unlikely men’s fashion trend has incubated.
“Everywhere I would go, I would see teenagers and young, cool-looking guys doing it,” Mr. Munce said. “It’s something new. It’s a little bit normcore, it’s a little bit skater.”
The designer Alexander Wang deployed the look in his latest offering. “There’s something quite youthful about socks with shorts, especially when pulled up, and I like that,” he said.
Photographers have captured the trend outside fashion shows, and paparazzi have recently turned their cameras on two celebrity practitioners, Jonah Hill and Joe Jonas.
Eugene Tong, a freelance stylist and a frequent subject of street style photographers, favors the look in his everyday life and has helped make it work for brands like John Elliott, Second/Layer and Public School.
“It’s one of those things you’re not supposed to do,” Mr. Tong said. “As a stylist, I’m always looking for something that presents this rebellious undertone.”
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To get the look right, Mr. Munce suggests going with a thick, athletic tube sock rather than a thin dress sock. And don’t be afraid to pull it up to its full length. The market is flush with such socks, from $15 for a three-pack from Vans to $80 for a pair from the luxury label Off-White.
Mr. Munce also has some advice on the length of the shorts: “It looks too ’70s if it’s with a short short, and it looks too sloppy if it’s a really long short.”
Mr. Tong took it a step further: high socks with baggy shorts.
“You have to have a bit of an attitude to pull it off,” he said. “But I think it’s something that can be easily done by anyone.”
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A version of this article appears in print on , Section
D
, Page
2
of the New York edition
with the headline:
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