Dress listeners, Bonjour from Paris.

Yes, we are currently on our annual summer hiatus from the show

as we conduct our summer fashion history tours of the City of Lights.

But worry not, we will be back with brand new content

dedicated to all of the exciting fashion history exhibitions

and other behind-the-scenes experiences we have encountered here. Until then, please enjoy this

episode from the Dressed Archive of over 500 past shows. With over 7 billion people in the world,

we all have one thing in common. Every day, we all get

dressed. Welcome to Dress, the History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what,

win of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts, Cassidy Zachary. And April

Callahan. Welcome, dress listeners, to yet another round of fashion history mystery,

where we answer your questions. And today's query comes to us all the way from the land down

under. Listener Rebecca Beaumont wrote to us very recently, and she said,

Hi from Australia. You both have spoken a lot about hemlines and the birth of the midi skirt,

but I would like to know about how and when shorts became a women's wear staple.

From Bermuda shorts to Daisy Dukes, they are a mainstay of my summer wardrobe.

Yes, and this is such an excellent question, Rebecca, and

pinpointing the exact moment shorts began to appear in women's closets or dresser drawers was one

that really required Apriline to put on our fabulous dress detective hats and dive into our

databases of historic magazines.

Yeah, and Cass, I think both of us had some sort of like very general awareness that by the middle of the 1930s we see very avant-garde, fashionable women wearing shorts, but usually only in the context of vacation or resort wear. So I wanted to investigate when we first see this term shorts being used by the fashion press.

And one fun thing I learned is that shorts is also a textile weaving term.

...