Attack of the jorts: Giant denim shorts have taken over New York City

As summer neared, Shaquil Stewart reached an age-old conclusion: He didn’t have the right clothes to wear in the warm weather. It was like his usual supply of shorts and lightweight pants had disappeared into thin air during the colder months.

Things became dire a few weeks ago when daytime temperatures skyrocketed to the high 80s. So the 25-year-old Brooklynite logged onto Depop, the secondhand fashion retail app beloved by Gen Z, and purchased a pair of baggy denim shorts.

Problem solved. The shorts served Stewart well on a recent afternoon in Manhattan’s Chinatown, where he spoke to Gothamist under the blazing hot sun, and the garment is on its way to becoming a staple in his wardrobe.

“I had a pair of jean shorts before and they were so tight on me, it was concerning,” he said. “Then I came across these online. Today is actually my second or third time wearing them and I’m feeling pretty confident. I think I found my speed.”

Stewart isn’t alone in this life-changing experience. Baggy “jorts,” a portmanteau of “jeans” and “shorts,” have amassed a growing number of fans in recent years — such that, in 2026, it is safe to say that we have reached Peak Big Jort. Millennials and older generations will recall when it was severely uncool to wear such loose silhouettes. They even attracted ridicule. But now, baggy denim shorts are de rigeur among younger New Yorkers. You can’t walk for five minutes in Bushwick or the Lower East Side without spotting a pair.

For the purposes of this conversation, we must first define what counts as a pair of jorts.

Some would say the term refers to any shorts made of denim. For others, it conjures the more specific image of denim shorts that graze or extend beyond the knee. The latter sort are what we’re talking about here: big, baggy shorts that help keep you cool in the summer.

Walking through the city after parting ways with Stewart, it became clear that big jorts are part of a greater collective choice to wear loose clothing. It’s like everyone collectively decided to emulate Adam Sandler.

Indya Brown, a stylist and fashion editor who splits time between New York City and Los Angeles, observed in a phone interview that the pivot to comfortable clothing is a natural extension of people wearing cozy garments while quarantining during the pandemic. Why would a woman fret about her Daisy Dukes riding up when she could take a cue from the boys and wear loose-fitting shorts?

“It hearkens back to ’90s jeans and the early 2000s, when things were trending more baggy, before the pendulum swung over to the extremely skinny side,” Brown said. “Baggier pants are also more forgiving. It’s tempting to wear jorts because it’s easy.”

Brown remembers when she first contemplated the concept of jorts. It was about seven or eight years ago. She worked in fashion partnerships at The Cut and was surprised to see Kendall Jenner wearing a pair.

“It wasn’t crazy,” Brown said, but “it was relatively new for women to adopt menswear-inspired pieces into their wardrobe.”

It wouldn't be as unexpected these days, given that gender-fluid fashion is all the rage. Celine creative director Michael Rider put on his first menswear runway show earlier this summer, featuring draped blouses and cinched waists pieces that could very well have been part of a womenswear collection. Brown noted that she has observed an uptick in men wearing Chanel clothing even though the brand doesn’t technically produce menswear.

Keri Ahearn, a 26-year-old living in East Harlem, said she was still bleary-eyed when she reached for a pair of vintage Girbaud jorts that morning. She got them on Poshmark after spotting a coworker in a similar pair, but when they arrived the waist was too big so she had them tailored. All that effort was worth it: “I’m not a short-shorts girly,” she said.

Justin Reyes, a 22-year-old from Bushwick, also opted for comfort when he paired H&M jorts with a bright white Uniqlo tee and black Salomon sneakers.

“I recently lost a lot of weight and my size went down, so I needed new clothes,” he said. “I didn’t have much money at the time so I was like, ‘Let me find a cheap option.’ H&M sounded good. I bought four jorts right there. Boom. And I just rotate through them.”

A passionate subset of jorts wearers never stopped or started the habit; the shorts were always in rotation. River Lyons, a 22-year-old from Washington Heights, has long worn jorts because of their utility. He clips his keys to their belt or hammer loops and jams his earbuds and wallet in the pockets. He buys them used — “I’m not paying $100 for jorts,” he noted, “eBay is the wave” — and has amassed a dozen or so pairs.

Over in SoHo, 22-year-old Lila Traynor from Orange County, California, sported a pair of Gap jorts that she borrowed from a male friend she was visiting. He thought they might look better on her, given her towering stature: “They’re more capri on him, more jort on me. I think they look cute.”

The friend, Sagi Shdaimah, added that the loose fit meshed with Traynor’s “boho, kind of like Free People, beachy vibes.”

Traynor styled the jorts with square-toe flip flops because “I just like to wear things that are comfortable. That’s my No. 1 priority.”

“I love wearing streetwear that’s dressed up, dressed down,” said Caroline Abreu, a 24-year-old graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology who grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Brooklyn. She paired her black jorts with a pair of orange Puma H-Street sneakers but has worn them with loafers, too. “I can wear them when I’m going to work and also going out after to get drinks with friends. I can wear them wherever.”

Abreu’s jorts were a classic midrise. But a sales associate at the SoHo location of Awoke Vintage, a curated vintage shop with row upon row of big denim shorts for sale, said that more and more people enter the store in search of the low-rise variety. A shiver runs down the spines of millennials and Gen Xers.

Next year, Awoke Vintage might be stocking an entirely different silhouette. Stylist Ian Bradley suggested in a phone interview that we look toward queer men to predict the clothing trends of the future: “When I started wearing skinny jeans, straight guys were not wearing them at all. Then, they were everywhere.”

The same went for straight-leg pants, and then the extremely baggy sort. Then shorts with 4-inch inseams, and now …

“That’s been the funny thing about gay guys, the big short trend. They’re like, ‘Well, the straight guys stole short shorts, so I guess we have to make our pants bigger.’”