[C]learly I was not alone in noticing this double standard. The designer Cynthia Rowley had been reading a report from The Associated Press that day that advised women to prepare for the heat wave by wearing dresses, but offered no guidance for men. "I should go down to Wall Street and set up a little booth where I could cut off their pants legs and hem them into shorts," she said. "But they would have to throw away their socks." There was a short-lived shorts moment in the 1950's, abbreviated for that reason.

*****

I wore a dressy pair of low-waisted, narrow knee-length navy twill shorts from Joseph, a white dress shirt, brown loafers (no socks) and a tightly tailored gray jacket from Thom Browne, another designer who put shorts suits in his fall collection. I found myself cooler, strangely confident and, because of that, walking more gaily than usual. But on the street, people stared. Some took pictures. "What country are you from?" asked Joe Gianotti, an insurance executive, who was eating lunch with Jim Silverberg, a manager at the New York Public Library, in Bryant Park, where the temperature approached 100 degrees. Mr. Silverberg wore long sleeves and a tie. Mr. Gianotti had taken his tie off and described himself as something unprintable for wearing it at all. "It is unfair," he said. "Women wear flip-flops and miniskirts, and some of them even have their stomachs out. But if I wore shorts, they'd make a big deal of it in the office. You look around, and all the men have long pants on, so it's obvious that you have to wear them. We're not in Bermuda."

Still, it struck me as defeatist that Mayor Bloomberg would not take his own advice and lighten up. "There are red lines that men won't cross," said Michael Anton, a former speechwriter for President Bush who now works for Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. Under the pseudonym Nicholas Antongiavanni, Mr. Anton wrote The Suit, a book on corporate style.

"Shorts, for the immediate future, are a step too far," he said. "If we ended up dressing identically for work and for leisure pursuits, men would feel intuitively that something has been lost." Comfort, for one thing. But on Friday I wore pants.