The Way We Live Now: Fashionably. But only for the necessities. $775 shorts for the men. Online shopping sprees for the olds. The basics.

With impeccable Enraging Thursday Styles Trend Piece timing, the NYT offers a story that is essentially a listing of the most outrageous male short prices of the season. Tom Ford's cotton chino tennis shorts, $650; Giorgio Armani's cotton drawstring shorts, $775; Thom Browne's seersucker man-skort, $1,495. Sadly, the Times reports, anybody looking to pay less than a hundred bucks for some shorts "will find few options outside of mall chains." Which, needless to say, is unacceptable.

There's also this sentence: "American Apparel sells a decent pair of city shorts for $42, but they look as if they might be from the suburbs." We don't know what that means.

All of this has apparently intimidated women in the over-35 demographic so much that they do all of their shopping online now. Which is a good thing! Not only are they supporting the entire online apparel shopping industry (despite the fact that it ignores them—CLOTHES FOR YOUNGS ONLY), they also stay safely at home, less likely to wander into the male shorts section of a luxury store and confuse everyone.

Meanwhile the state of California cannot afford clothes at all.