Spend enough time online—and baby, do I ever—and you’ll start to see certain tendencies emerge among the trendiest of serial posters. One day, seemingly out of nowhere, all of the hip content creators on your feed are suddenly wearing flip-flops, say, or crewneck cardigans. One of the most lasting recent trends of this ilk involves a triumvirate of pieces that, when worn in tandem, evokes the sock-hop uniform of a 1950s high schooler: shorts, white socks, and loafers.
Pleated in Osaka, jorted in Greece, or tatted ’n’ hatted in London, the shorts-socks-loafer combination is a global phenomenon that seems to appeal to style-minded guys across the space-time continuum. There is a smooth-brain simplicity to it—it’s just three classic menswear pieces worn together in a way that somehow feels both familiar, tapping into the most classic of Ivy iconography, and also new, remixing it for our post-streetwear, social-media-myopic era.
Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick, who writes the popular newsletter “The Trend Report,” sees this as a stylistic callback to iconic images of, say, Harrison Ford at Cannes in the ’80s or Paul Newman at home in the ’60s, but reflected through the current lens of skate culture, hence the baggier short silhouettes. That also makes it a more approachable (read: traditionally masculine) version of the daring stylings of Harry Styles, Paul Mescal and Donald Glover. “It poses a tension between the formal and informal,” Fitzpatrick said. “That these two can exist in one space, suggesting that these skaters are donning camp collar shirts and loafers after hopping off their boards.”
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