I Almost Cut My $400 Jeans Into Jorts. Then I Found a Dupe.

I’ve found so much to love about these jeans — the five roomy, well-placed patch pockets, the fairly high rise, the gentle stretch. The Japanese denim is sumptuous, and the barrel shape is subtle and flattering, made possible by a series of darts at the knees and the butt (replacing the traditional yoke), as well as a gusset that runs up and down the entire inseam.

All that is to say, the Shon jeans are truly special — they aren’t just a pair of jeans, they’re sculpture.

But one thing they are not is shorts. And when the scorching New York summer rolled around, I found myself longing for the shorts equivalent of my favorite pants.

Nili Lotan does offer a few different denim short options, but nothing resembling my beloved Shon jeans. For a self-indulgently deluded minute, I actually pondered buying a second pair of the jeans and cutting them up. But then I remembered that I have a kid who may someday go to college, and that my dog takes a pricey antidepressant, and that a hunk of my 2013 Toyota Tacoma’s chassis recently ripped off and clanged away somewhere on the 91 between Hartford and New Haven.

So rather than drop another $410 on the Shon jeans, I did the far more affordable thing: I cast about on Amazon for “high waisted barrel jeans with pockets,” and the Evaless Baggy Barrel Jeans popped up in the results, with a higher star rating (4.5 out of five) than most of the other options. They lacked the gusset and the clever dart construction of the Shon jeans, but for $35, they had the same high waist and five capacious pockets, plus a barrel-iness that hit exactly like my beloved Nili Lotan pair.

And that’s where my Fiskars scissors and I swooped in! To fashion the Evaless pair into jorts — aka hemmed jean shorts, generally longer than cutoffs — I snipped off the legs a few inches above the knee, right where the outer leg starts curving back in, to create what was ultimately an A-line jorts silhouette.

Thanks to my mother, a gifted seamstress, I know my way around a sewing machine. But fair warning: She would blanch at the process I am about to describe, which relies heavily on “eyeballing” — a term she has certainly never uttered.

In any case, here’s how it went down (and note that these steps will help you turn any pair of jeans, expensive or not, into a pair of jorts):

First I put on the pants, decided on the ideal jorts length, and marked that spot with a pin. I then cut the pant leg off about 2 inches below the pin to allow for the hem; after I folded the pants exactly in half, I cut the second leg to the same length. Next, turning the shorts inside out, I used the pin as my marker to iron a fold around each leg opening and then pressed it under again. (My mom would tell you that this is called a “double-fold hem” and point out that you should really use about four dozen pins to hold it in place. I didn’t use a single one.) Striking while the ironed parts were literally still hot, I ran the hems through my sewing machine with a 2 mm straight stitch.

The entire process took about 30 minutes, start to finish, including the time it took me to heat the iron, haul out my sewing machine, and thread the bobbin.

And on the other side of that half hour, I had gotten as close to owning $400 jorts as I ever planned to. Of course, the Evaless jeans-turned-jorts are not the exact same thing as a Nili Lotan pair. The real Nili Lotan jeans are a soft but sturdy 98% cotton with just 2% polyurethane, while the Evaless Faux-tan jeans, in contrast, are 65% cotton, 33% polyester, and 2% elastane. My colleague Zoe Vanderweide, Wirecutter’s resident expert on jeans, pointed out that the Evaless jeans are not nearly as well made as the Shon pair, and that the fabric looks noticeably cheaper.

Despite their differences, my Evaless jorts have become one of my favorite items in my closet. I am most enamored by the stretchiness of the five good-sized pockets.

They accommodate so much, I can leave home without my usual crossbody bag: I can keep cash and hair clips in the roomy coin pocket, my phone in one back pocket and my Kindle in the other, reading glasses and a sunscreen stick in one front pocket, and sometimes even my coffee thermos in the other. (No need for the claw grip with these pocket-abundant babies!) The fabric’s spandexy give also makes these jorts especially comfy for all manner of activities, from hanging out at home to taking long walks to going on weekend road trips. Seven-hour stints in the car are so much more bearable when a waistband stretches and leg openings are loose.

No one has mistaken my Evaless pair for the Shon jeans, and thank heaven for that: The Shon jeans are a work of art, and considering their expense and small-designer origins, I imagine I will keep them in my jeans archive for decades, even when the barrel cut has faded from fashion. My jorts, meanwhile, are a work of arts and crafts — a testament to buying the bargain thing, bringing some basic sewing skills, and elevating it into something entirely my own.

I’ve worn these jorts virtually every day since making them, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. They are everything I need them to be for summer, without a hefty price tag. Conveniently, my birthday hits at the end of summer, so until then I will be dreaming about my next splurgy treat while wearing my favorite wallet-saving hack.

This article was edited by Hannah Rimm and Maxine Builder.