It's best on a hot day, the ideal way to get our feet air and fight its capsule summer.
However, the shorts do not prove to be as friendly in our pocket as one might at least assume.
Generally speaking, shorts are not cheaper than a pair of trousers, despite the obvious fact that one requires much less fabric to be made than the other.
As you can see, the shorts cover only half the surface of a pair of pants. And so their close price seems a bit paradoxical, another of its dystrophies market one would say.
But is that the case?
It is not that clothing companies are trying to deceive consumers by raising the prices of shorts.
Price is again a function of it production costs. Shorts need less fabric, but not as much as one would imagine.
Market players reveal that shorts that stop above the knee need only 1/5 less fabric than regular pants. Why is this happening;
Because the shorts have a built-in plenty of fabric, they are simply sewn on the upper half of the garment. And the upper half is also the most expensive part, as it has all the decorative and useful features, those that require the most fabric.
Shorts and pants are the same and unchanged, always in terms of construction, in their upper part. There are the pockets, the loops for the belt, the pleats, the waistband, etc.
These consume the largest amount fabric and these require the most man-hours to make a pair of pants. Short or long.
From the upper part results the substantial cost of manufacturing the garment. Cotton, for example, in a blues represents only a minimal percentage of its cost.
The person who will sew it from the raw material definitely costs more. He will need about the same amount of time, whether he is working in long pants or Bermuda shorts.
Eunice Lee, designer at the Unis New York menswear brand, gives us her lights here.
"The amount of fabric you use for the shorts is not really that different between shorts and trousers"A pair of trousers may need 1,6 yards [1,46 meters] of fabric, while the same shorts will need 1,3 yards [1,18 meters]," he told Esquire.
He continues: "Let's say, in theory, that fabric costs $ 10 a yard. We are talking about just $ 3 difference in fabric cost. The difference in the fabric is not drastic, because most of the fabric is needed in the upper part of the pants, not in the legs ".
She confirms that all the work in a pair of pants is the top part of it. "Everything happens in the upper part. In terms of cutting and sewing, all the complicated things happen up. The price is related to the work and the cost of this work. And the work is the same, regardless of whether the leg is short or long ".
He even tells us to do it experiment and ourselves. Take a pair of pants and shorts and turn them upside down. We will see that all the difficult seams are in their complex upper part. The legs have only a simple and straight seam.
"This intricate construction, this delicate detail, this is the cost. The leg of the pants is the easiest part to sew ".
No one doubts that the range of fashion is wide and the final price of a product is related to the image promoted by each brand. But here we are talking about a purely technical issue, that of pricing.
Long sleeves and short sleeves shirts they also do not have significant differences in their price. And the reason is the same again. In long-sleeved shirts there is of course the cuff and sometimes its intricate seams can skyrocket the price.
The pants, however, have all its basic features in the upper part, what we find in shorts.
But sometimes it happens that one pair of shorts costs more than one pair of pants. This is where the so-called "invisible factors" of the market come in, conditions like where and how the clothes were made, the costs for advertising and definitely the logo on the label.
The final price is shaped not only by the cost of production, but also by the corporate model followed by each company.
We are accustomed to the truth in our daily lives that it costs more and more. We see it in the different packaging of the same product, in the size of the cup of coffee we drink every morning, in the menus of fast food.
When you buy less than something, you expect it to be even cheaper. They call it common sense, except that the issue of shorts and pants does not fit here.
Not just because the shorts need just as much fabric to make, but because the real cost is based on other factors, as we said. The working hours for its production are the decisive factors and the differences with a long pants are small.
Equally important, if not more important, is the factor of the firm itself. Psychology has been studying consumer behavior for years and has repeatedly suggested that we are willing to pay more for something more expensive if we consider it luxurious.
We tend to value goods that have recognizable corporate marks with a positive sign. And since we hire the non luxury products as inferior usually, we are ready to distinguish all their negatives.
Worse, "low self-esteem is a decisive factor in whether a person will buy an expensive product that they may not be able to afford," concludes a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
And so when you buy shorts, you pay a lot more than the amount of fabric used. Tangible things, like production costs, and intangible and undefined things, like the added value of the brand.
These second things do not obey the usual laws of rational consumer behavior. Not even in our expectations.
"It simply came to our notice then price when we talk about shorts and short-sleeved shirts ", emphasizes the designer Lee," especially because something like shorts does not look like an object that you will invest in, such as a winter coat or a pair of boots. But the price is not based here, everything has to do with the process ".
The price of the shorts never had to do with the less fabric or the smaller size…