A month ago (see the 21.6. post) I was puzzled by the enigma of the unofficial school uniform that made its presence known among male students with sudden and surprising consistency. As chance would have it, I now find myself the owner of such a pair of compromising, 75 percent legwear. For an unspecified reason, my brother happened to have a pair unfit for him, so I got it for free. The trousers in question feel quite comfortable in less-than-hot and more-than-cold temperatures; perhaps I should start calling them compromise pants. The name might take off, since apparently people haven't been able to decide what to call them yet. Capris, flood pants, clam diggers, cropped pants... I really think a standard name would be useful. Even people like me can adapt to unexplainable changes in the fashion force-fed to us if the new dominant paradigm has an understandable name. It's a completely different question where these things came from and why. Women's capris, I understand, were launched in the sixties, but men's three-quarter pants are a very recent phenomenon. Some guru just had an idea, I guess, and decided to make a profit. And I'm afraid the why-question is irrelevant, as it so often is.

While I'm at it, could someone write a critical history of men's swimwear? Maybe someone already has, I need to check. Why do men in certain parts of the world use almost exclusively shorts in leisure swimming, while in others the self-evident choice is basic skintight brief trunks? I prefer the latter, and I would like to know why anyone would want to swim in loose knee-length shorts. What's the idea behind it? You just have ten times the necessary amount of wet fabric against your skin. Or are both of these curiosities (compromise pants and swimming shorts) just expressions of a neocon belief that baring skin is a sin? 01:03