ABSTRACT
The hot pants ceased to be fashionable, oddly enough, with the arrival of the peak summer months. During the wintery months of early 1971, department stores and boutiques could not stock their shelves fast enough with hot pants for women. Also known as short shorts, cool pants, short cuts, and les shorts, they were quickly accepted everywhere-in restaurants, offices, churches, and even black-tie dinners. Generally augmented by boots and tights used as body stockings, they eschewed the sturdy materials used in the sportswear type of shorts. Fashion experts generally attributed the craze to a general reaction against the prim and dowdy-looking midiskirt. Manhattan Boutique proprietor Jimmi York noted, 'The way women are buying and men are reacting, it would seem legs have been out of sight for ten years, not ten months'. In all probability, this decline was hastened by the limitations of the average female physique. As designer Rudi Gernreich admitted, 'great, but for great bodies'.
