Leather shorts, yay or nay? The material can be a hit or a miss in men’s fashion

Leather remains one of those tripwire fabrics in men’s fashion. Pictured here is a pair of leather shorts as seen on the runway during Prada's Spring/Summer 2023 show. Photo: Prada

In March, Brandon Mahler took a pair of thrifted leather pants and spliced them into shorts. Holding the results, Mahler, a fashion consultant in New York, had to acknowledge that he’d crossed the line of sartorial sanity.

“When are you wearing leather shorts?” Mahler said, speaking with a Hyde-like clarity about this Jekyll-esque tailoring experiment. “They don’t make sense.”