Boxer shorts have always been the ultimate bedroom essentials. They are roomy, comfy and tailored in either crisp cotton or soft satin.

The undergarment is now all over the high fashion runways and lookbooks, styled with couture tops or paired with a long car coat.

It was Miu Miu’s 2022 collection that increased their popularity, followed by The Row, which opened its pre-fall 2023 show with a blazer teamed with boxers. Couture labels like Julie de Libran, too, couldn’t resist their appeal, sending out a sheen-inducing pair of shorts styled with a black corset and a pair of opera-length gloves. Also, worth mentioning is Marc Jacobs Fall ’22 outing, which featured cutesy high-neck tops tucked under a pair of micro shorts. Back home, labels like Shivan & Narresh and Sameer Madan have toyed with them in their collections as well.

Narresh Kukreja, Shivan & Narresh’s creative director, says there is definitely a much larger movement across the fashion landscape that is kickstarting a lot of these new micro trends, changing the face of new-age fashion consumption altogether. “One of them is shorts. The post-pandemic world has really shaped the way people are consuming fashion; they are looking at it more from the perspective of comfort and acceptability,” he says.

Designer Sameer Madan explains that casual chic is the key phrase here. “It’s about keeping it easy and on trend. It’s a fresh take on the Y2K trend right now,” he says. “There are various ways to style as it’s quite versatile a garment. You can dress it up with a boyfriend blazer fit with a thick high waist belt and boots. It’s great with a fitted bodysuit and crop blazer.”

Such trends also help break the stereotypical idea of clothes, blurring the lines between what’s formalwear and casualwear. Take shorts, for instance. “It is absolutely acceptable today to wear shorts in a formal setting as much as it was always okay in a casual space. Today, you see this whole new wave of de-casualisation of shorts; it’s becoming more apparent, especially on the runway shows and being styled with blazers, shirts, formal co-ord sets, etc. You see it on a man, a woman, any gender,” adds Kukreja.

While these essentials may be all the rage in the campaigns and on IG feeds, it’s still tricky to pull off these bottoms.

“You can easily wear it with jackets, blazers, trench coats, vests, crop tops, bikinis, swimsuits, and so on. The fact that a nice pair of boxer shorts goes with almost anything in your wardrobe definitely adds to it amping up the style quotient and versatility in your everyday attire,” explains Kukreja.