Hotpants were available for women, men and children, although they were principally worn by women. Mass-produced versions were also sold through the Sears mail-order catalogue. Many designers from across the Western world produced their own versions of hotpants at all price levels, including Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Halston, and Betsey Johnson. Hotpants are also increasingly credited to Mary Quant, who offered brief shorts in the late 1960s, although these were intended as modesty knickers to wear with matching minidresses rather than standalone fashion garments. Lambert credits Mariuccia Mandelli of the Italian fashion label Krizia with designing the first "hot pants" in 1970. In contrast to the lukewarm response to the midi, shoppers enthusiastically embraced the idea of short shorts, which were made available at all price levels from haute couture to inexpensive ready-to-wear. Reception Īt the end of the 1960s, the fashion industry had tried unsuccessfully to promote the mid-calf-length or midi skirt as a fashionable replacement for the miniskirt. While hotpants were principally marketed to women, men were also targeted, and the term can describe very short men's shorts. ![]() Today, the term hotpants can be used for casual as well as fashion-wear short-shorts made in any fabric. Other alternative names included "les shorts", "short cuts", "cool pants", and "shortootsies", with "booty shorts" as an early 21st-century term. Jet 's fashion editor, Audrey Smaltz, suggested that because hotpants were best suited to Black women, they should be called "Knockout Shorts" as that name was more "relevant to Blacks", expressing the fashionable African-American woman's pride in her "knockout body" as well as paying tribute to Black identity and recent struggles. The WWD claim to have originated the term is also backed up by 1971 articles in The New York Times and the African-American magazine Jet. Īccording to the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, the term "hot pants" was coined by Women's Wear Daily ( WWD) in 1970 to describe fashions innovated by the French ready-to-wear company Dorothée Bis. However, Tricario also observed that shorts had never before had such widespread acceptance as street or business wear as they did in early 1971. Dorothy Tricario, a fashion curator at the Brooklyn Museum told The New York Times in 1971 that hotpants were part of a greater nostalgic revival of 1930s and 1940s fashion, specifically the short posing shorts worn by Hollywood stars like Ruby Keeler, Deanna Durbin, and Betty Grable. These garments, however, were designed mainly for sports, beachwear and leisure wear, while hotpants were innovative in that they were made from non-activewear fabrics such as velvet, silk, crochet, fur and leather, and styled explicitly to be worn on the street, for parties, or even as bridal wear. Whilst the term "hotpants" is used generically to describe extremely short shorts, similar garments had been worn since the 1930s. Performers such as Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue have famously worn hotpants as part of their public performances and presentation. ![]() However, hotpants continued to be popular as clubwear well into the 2010s and are often worn within the entertainment industry, particularly as part of cheerleader costumes or for dancers (especially backup dancers). While hotpants were briefly a very popular element of mainstream fashion in the early 1970s, by the mid-1970s they had become associated with the sex industry, which contributed to their fall from fashion. The term has since become a generic term for any pair of extremely short shorts. The term was first used by Women's Wear Daily in 1970 to describe shorts made in luxury fabrics such as velvet and satin for fashionable wear, rather than their more practical equivalents that had been worn for sports or leisure since the 1930s. Hotpants or hot pants are extremely short shorts. ![]() ![]() Man wearing pink hotpants for a gay pride event, 2010
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |