[doorgunner69]

over the last decade with all the “rad” “dudes” wearing exactly the same style of baggy “shorts” at the beaches or in the public parks -and had to guffaw at how they somehow think it is now today’s height of fashion to be wearing such obviously identical attire

Yabbut, do they have those cool huge rubber boots to go with the shorts?

FWIW, loose shorts work very well in warm weather. It is the only attire I wear other than tee shirts and slippers (flip-flops for you mainland types).

Spend some time doing anything active in the desert in summer in long pants and then change to shorts.

All it will take to see the light. Had to work out at Ft Irwin in the summer a few years. It was insane how much more comfortable it was if you could expose some skin to help sweat evaporation.

[Utilizer]

I spent a lot of time in the Far East and the Pacific Islands. The attire I wore most was generally a thin shirt or tee-shirt of some kind since air-conditioning was only for the very rich who could afford personal generators for when the daily power brownouts and blackouts would kick in, and cutoff old jeans that had gotten too holey for normal wear, and were no more than a couple of inches below pocket level so the inner pocket pouches were in no danger of accidental damage.

Knee-length half-trousers were a waste of material and only the old fogeys that still wore mostly full-body "swimsuits" wore them. Think of all the original Bond movies and most especially the ones that came out in the seventies and that is the much-less heat-trapping styles that worked the best in such hot and humid environments.