Foreign Trade Black Athletic Shorts Review: Polyester Mid-Thigh Shorts at $7.46

Foreign Trade's black athletic shorts arrive as one folded pair in a plain poly bag: polyester, a straight mid-thigh leg, a drawstring waist, script lettering across the front and small patch details on the lower legs. The listing price is $7.46, down from $8.51, SKU 7720570468, and the page currently shows white, black, orange and green across sizes M, L, XL, 2XL and 3XL. We ordered the black pair through the standard channel, logged it against the receipt and put it through the same handling we give any wearable we score.

How we tested

Priya Raman's apparel routine borrows the structure of our connected-gear bench work: take the reading three times from a cold start, then check that the numbers survive a reset. Here the cold start is the pair straight out of the bag, and the reset is a wash. We measured the waist, hip and inseam flat three times before the first wear, re-measured after each of three cold machine washes, and photographed every pass in the white booth. We also shot the fabric under our four booth light settings to see how the black reads against a plain tee and against a hoodie, which is how the pair is most likely to be worn.

Fabric and feel

The listing names polyester as the main fabric with slight stretch, and that matches what our hands found: a light, slightly slick surface with a small amount of give across the hip and thigh, no stiffness straight out of the bag, and no chemical smell after two days of airing. The pair reads as summer wear rather than gym gear. It is not a performance short with a liner, a compression panel or a moisture-management story, and the listing makes no claim of the kind.

Where the listing goes quiet is where we slow down. There are no care instructions on the page, the weight field is empty, and the specification block carries two different seasonal entries, one for a 2024 summer release and one for 2025. Those are normal loose ends for a factory-source listing, but they are loose ends, and we treat them as such.

The cut, in numbers

Our flat numbers sit in an ordinary range for a men's straight short, but the seller publishes no waist, hip or inseam chart, so there is nothing to check our figures against. That gap matters more than any single measurement in this review.

Price, print and construction notes

At $7.46 the pair is priced as a factory-source basic, and it behaves like one. The drawstring runs smoothly through the channel on our test unit, the leg hem is a single-needle finish with no visible puckering after three washes, and the printed script across the front and the patch details on the lower legs both survived the same cycle without lifting at the edges. Seam ends inside the waistband are trimmed, not sealed, which is the kind of detail that shows up at this price and rarely shows through in wear.

The black colorway is the safest of the four for the printed lettering, since the script relies on contrast rather than color matching. In our white-booth reference shots the black reads matte rather than glossy, so it pairs cleanly with a plain tee and sneakers, and layers under a hoodie without looking like a uniform.

Ordering without a size chart

1. Message the seller for flat waist, hip and inseam measurements in the size you intend to buy.
2. Compare those figures against a pair of shorts you already own rather than against a body measurement.
3. Name your colorway in the same message. The title highlights black, but the page lists four colors, so confirm which one is being shipped.

No independent buyer claims are available for this listing, so the materials and cut can be described but the long-term feel and wear cannot be confirmed from the page alone. Treat it as a specification listing, not a tested product record.

What we would change

A published size chart is the single fix that would raise this pair for us. A one-line care note and a corrected season entry would help too. None of those changes affect the price, and all of them would remove the guesswork that currently sits between a shopper and the right size.