Soffe shorts

M.J. Soffe founded his company in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1946 as a distributor of supplies to military exchanges and commissaries, and the brand still bills itself as "Outfitting America's Original Athlete since 1946." Schools were the other lane: plain Soffe gym shorts were once standard issue for junior high, high school and college PE classes, boys and girls alike.

The version everyone remembers is the Authentic Soffe Short, the cheer short: soft cotton, a V-notch at the side seam, and a white logo waistband made to fold over. Cheerleaders adopted it, then everyone who had ever watched a cheerleader did, and the fold became the point — rolled once, twice, three times until the waistband was a thick white cuff and the inseam was theoretical. The roll is the entire memory.

Soffe became a subsidiary of Delta Apparel and kept its Fayetteville headquarters. In 2012 the U.S. Marine Corps ended a licensing deal after paperwork for Marine-logo garments turned up in a burned-out factory in Bangladesh. Delta filed for Chapter 11 in June 2024 and was later liquidated; that September the sock maker Renfro Brands bought the Soffe business, and the Authentic Short is still in the catalog, fold-over waistband intact.