If you’re an American male, there’s a 99% chance that at some point in your life, you wore shorts in inappropriate weather. I will never forget the day I was on a school trip to Tiananmen Square (don’t even ask), and one of the 7th-grade boys in our group was fully dressed in basketball shorts in freezing weather. Chinese passersby kept pointing and staring at him, and one guy even took a picture of him with his iPad, the shutter sound blaring. 

A young man wearing shorts in the snow means different things in different cultural contexts. In an American middle school, it’s cool to seem unfazed by the cold weather. In the middle of Beijing, you look like a complete idiot. No matter the context, you’re bound to get some attention when you wear your snow shorts.