80s jam shorts

’80s jam shorts, or jams, were what you got if you crossed a tropical-themed shirt with a baggy pair of shorts. They were hugely popular in the late 1980s. Originally designed to appeal to surfers, skaters, and punk rockers, they found a fourth niche in an unexpected place.

1980s jams shorts

Reading the early accounts of jam shorts from the summer of 1985, I was about as far from the target audience as you could get. They described jams as colorfully loud, long, and baggy shorts for surfers, skaters, and punk rockers.

The surfer and skater audience explains the reason so many of them had a tropical-themed pattern.

Those patterns didn’t look like me, so I defaulted to the punk rock patterns. It would be a few years before I would find out who Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, or any of the Ramones were, so I was anything but a punk rocker. Yet, jam shorts were something I probably wore every day 5 months out of the year for the second half of the 1980s. It wasn’t about the colors. I had some that were loud and obnoxious, arguably, and I had some that were relatively tame. It was more a matter of practicality. 80s jam shorts were practical? Hear me out. They were comfortable. They were loose fitting and had pockets if I needed them, so that was a plus. Most importantly, I could wear them to school.

You see, until jams became popular, you couldn’t wear shorts to school if you were over the age of 12 in the 1980s. At least not to parochial schools like the ones I attended. And those schools didn’t have central air conditioning. In some cases the classrooms had window units, but not always.

The rule came about from the problem, real or imagined, of girls wearing inappropriately short shorts to school and disrupting the learning environment. I say imagined for two reasons. One is the perception that one particular girl dressed inappropriately and that’s why we had the rule. That was the rumor at my school, except that rule existed years before her time. The administration was perfectly fine letting her take the fall.

The second reason I say imagined is because there wasn’t a dress code at the university I attended a few years later. And we didn’t have a problem. Sure, there were people who flunked out. But I knew a half dozen guys who flunked out, including my second-semester roommate. The dress code wasn’t the problem.

But I digress.

The double standard

The anti-shorts rules created a double standard. Girls could wear skirts and get some relief from the heat, as long as they were knee-length or longer. Guys weren’t going to do that. I threatened to play the Scottish card and call it a kilt and cite heritage. But everyone knew I wouldn’t follow through with it.

Jams solved the problem. They were baggy shorts that reached the top of the knee, the general length of what schools would allow skirts to be. Whether this was accidental or intentional doesn’t matter. They got popular and the schools decided to allow them.

Of course, jams raised the question whether jean shorts would be okay. And the answer was they were okay until they weren’t. It was about 1989 that they stopped being OK. During that 1988-1989 timeframe, two things became true. Rolling jean shorts to a particular length was fashionable, and jeans with holes in them were fashionable. I don’t remember anyone wearing jean shorts with holes in them. And the suspicion that girls were going into the bathroom and rolling their jean shorts higher was exactly that, a suspicion. But sometimes perception can be more powerful than reality.

The ban on jean shorts applied regardless of gender, so that increased the shelf life of jams, at least for those who attended parochial schools. I think that’s why jam shorts lasted longer than some other 1980s fads did.

Why 80s jams shorts were loudly colored

The loud colors of 80s jams shorts were a reflection of the original target audience. The tropical designs appealed to the surfer crowd, and by extension, to skaters. I think the punk rocker movement was more misunderstood in the 1980s than it is today. The stereotype was that punk was basically heavy metal with simpler colors and all the band members had Mohawk haircuts, often dyed colors that don’t appear in nature. So the punk rock jams featured bright colors and indistinct angular shapes, to match those Mohawk haircuts and those bright red and yellow guitars. Or, it’s possible some designers knew that punk rock was really about anarchy as much as anything else, and they decided brightly colored angular shapes look like anarchy. Plus, the colors were already in use in another 80s pop culture icon, Swatch watches.

Regardless, when you find a picture of a punk rock band, typically they wore black t-shirts and jeans. Sometimes the jeans had holes in them, at least until that look became popular. Like many stereotypes, the punk stereotype wasn’t an accurate representation of the whole population.

So why did jam shorts catch on in the 80s when the look was basically astroturfed?

I think it was for two reasons. The main one was because they didn’t look like ’70s and early ’80s running shorts. You know, the ones that were short and tight and a single solid color, usually red, and had a thin white outline around them. Jams were about as different from those as you could get. The late ’80s, you see, were a reaction against the late 70s and early 80s as much as anything.

The second reason was because the length appeased prudish school administrators.

Today’s athletic shorts, at least the ones I see, are the spiritual descendant of ’80s jams. The design is toned down, but there was nothing sacred about the tropical design or the punk-rock-stereotype design. If they’d made long shorts in the ’80s that look like the ones of today, we would have worn them.