Hotpants

Hotpants, hot pants, or booty shorts describe extremely short shorts, which may be worn by women and, to a lesser extent, by men. The term was first used by Women's Wear Daily in 1970, it was used 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. The term has since become a generic term for any pair of extremely short shorts. 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. However, hotpants continue 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). Perfomers such as Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue have famously worn hotpants as part of their public performances and presentation.

Whilst the term "hotpants" is used generically to describe extremely short shorts, similar garments had been worn since the 1930s. 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. 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. However, Tricario also observed that shorts had never before had such widespread acceptance as street or business wear as they did in early 1971.

According 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. 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.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 Black woman's pride in her "knockout body" as well as paying tribute to Black identity and recent struggles. Other alternative names included "les shorts", "short cuts", "cool pants", and "shortootsies", with "booty shorts" as an early 21st-century term.

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