Yes, I do like the song ‘California Gurls’, thank you very much, :p, but what actually brought this to mind was rewatching the MST3K episode with “Swamp Diamonds” - when the escaped female prisoners cut off the legs of their jeans to make demin shorts (and which Crow indicated was the whole point of the movie).
OK, so they had ladies’ demin shorts back in 1954 (and probably much earlier), but since Catherine Bach and them Duke Boys wouldn’t be getting into “a whole mess o’ trouble” till 1979, was there a slang phrase that meant Daisy Dukes before then?
We wore short shorts!
Hot pants.
They should have called them Daisy Mae’s!
Cutoffs.
If they don’t wear any pants, they can all them Daisy Ducks
I remember my mother referring to cutoffs that way in the 60’s.
-Also, wasn’t the character in Dukes of Hazzard named Daisy Mae Duke, after the Li’l Abner character?
Daisy Mae’s does sound reasonable as a slang term - cutoffs I figure was the real store term (“cutoff demin shorts”) but maybe it was a slang term too.
Wasn’t Short-Shorts a term from the 1970s meaning not demin cutoffs, but sports shorts in some sort of nylon/polyester/whatever 70s fabric styles? (All I can remember as a kid was that stupid ad jingle - “Nair for short-shorts!”)
And wikipedia agrees with Daisy ‘Mae’ Duke, but I can only picture (in the TV show) Deputy Enos saying her full name (in his most bashful voice, of course).
It was a late 1950’s song that Nair resurrected for those commercials*, so the term long predates The Dukes of Hazzard.
Page on Short Shorts:
http://badfads.com/pages/fashion/short-shorts.html
*1957, by the Royal Teens.
Bermuda Shorts. Pretty much any repurposed Denim Jean Cutoff Shorts regardless of length were just generically called “Bermudas”.
I don’t recall different terms for cutoffs based on length. They were all cutoffs, although shorts themselves went from capris and clamdiggers up to hot pants.
Quoth Sigmagirl:
I thought hot pants were made of Spandex or similar stretchy material, not denim.
Aye, the hot pants.
I agree with Chronos. “Hot pants” and “Daisy Dukes” bring up different (albeit both pleasant 
) images in my mind.
Bermuda shorts go down to your knee. . .they are basically the opposite of Daisy Dukes. Bermudas and Daisy Dukes.
My recollection is that Hot Pant could be made of any material. Most, in my recollection, weren’t stretchy.
When worn by men? “Stylish and not the least bit gay.”
I don’t know what we were thinking.
Cut-offs, is what we called them in the 1970s. “Daisy Dukes” are cut-off cut really high on the thigh, like the running shorts which were in fashion at the time.
Look, Like I said, that’s what they called cut-off denim shorts regardless of length.
Said the grammar police to the fashion police…
Fugly?
All I’m saying is that bermuda shorts are actually a specific thing. It’s not a generic term like “cut offs.”