Foreign Trade Red Casual Shorts Review: Hands-On With a $4.93 Drawstring Summer Short

The Foreign Trade red shorts are the cheapest garment to reach our wash sink this quarter: a reference price of $4.93 USD, a drawstring waist, and a thin polyester-spandex cloth the listing sells as summer wear. We ordered the red pair in size XL, logged it on arrival, measured it at three points and cold-washed it once before writing this review.

Order, arrival and packaging

The parcel reached our Rotterdam desk four weeks after the order cleared the agent warehouse. The shorts arrived inside a plain grey poly mailer with no inner bag, folded once and secured with a single strip of tape. One bottom corner of the mailer was crushed and the tape had lifted slightly, but the contents were untouched — no snags, no seam distortion, no dampness, and no chemical smell on opening. For a $4.93 item moving through consolidation, that is a normal amount of handling wear.

A small woven size tag is sewn into the left side of the waistband. The care label gives fibre content but no wash symbols, no country of origin and no batch or lot stamp, so we could not tie this unit to a production run. If a factory changes the cloth between batches, there is nothing on the garment that would tell you.

Measured at three points

The listing publishes no waist, hip or inseam figures at all — only the size range. Our normal method is to measure the garment against the seller's chart, so with no chart to check against we took our own flat measurements and used them to test the two shape claims the listing does make: a mid-rise waist and a straight leg.

The waistband sat at roughly mid-rise on our 178 cm tester and the leg opening read straight rather than tapered, so those two claims hold up. The waistband returned to within about 1 cm of its relaxed measurement after 30 seconds of stretch, which is decent recovery for a knit this thin. Seam allowances in the side seams measured 0.6 cm with a clean overlock finish and no loose thread tails; the hem is a simple double-fold stitch with no visible skipped stitches.

The two spec lines that disagree

The listing contradicts itself, and this is the single most important thing to settle with the seller before ordering. The translated spec sheet says both of these at once:

Material function: high stretch. Elasticity: slight stretch. Pant style: long-tube cut. Pant length: mid-thigh shorts.

In practice our unit is a short with a 16 cm inseam, so the "long-tube" line looks like a template artefact carried over from a trousers listing rather than a description of this garment. That settles the leg-length question for this batch, but it does not tell you what a different size or colourway will arrive as. Stretch is genuinely moderate: the cloth gives easily on the bias but does not snap back hard, more consistent with the "slight stretch" field than the "high stretch" one.

Wash test and shrinkage

We washed the shorts once on a cold cycle with mild detergent and air-dried them flat. The waistband relaxed to 38.5 cm — inside tolerance and not a real change — and the inseam was unchanged. The colour is the bigger finding: the first cold wash released enough dye to tint the water a visible pink, and a second rinse released noticeably less. Wash the red pair on its own for the first cycle, and do not leave it soaking against light-coloured laundry. Fading after two cycles was slight and even, without patchiness.

Wear notes

The cloth is thin enough to read as summer-weight and it breathes well in warm, humid conditions; it also creases and holds the crease until it is pressed or washed out. The drawstring runs about 122 cm end to end and ties securely, and there are no belt loops, so a belt is not an option. The two side pockets are shallow, roughly 11 cm deep, and will not hold a phone securely when you sit down.

Price, fees and what the $4.93 does not cover

The item is listed in stock at $4.93, down from a $5.82 original price. That figure covers the garment only. Agent service fees, domestic delivery inside China, QC photo requests and international freight are all billed separately by whichever line you choose, and those costs are set by the agent rather than the seller. At 143 g, this short barely moves the needle on a parcel's billable weight, so it makes little sense to ship it alone — consolidate it with heavier items and confirm the current rates on the agent site before you commit.

Our read

The weakness here is not the price or the basic build; it is the paperwork. A buyer who orders straight from the size buttons is guessing at the waist, because nothing numeric is published and the stretch description is self-contradictory. Send the seller a request for flat waist and inseam measurements in your target size, and ask whether the cloth in that colourway matches the sample photos, since the listing lists six colour names while the compiled summary counts seven colourways — another loose end worth pinning down. Do that and you are buying a very cheap, very light drawstring short that does exactly what a summer casual short should. Skip the messages and you are buying a lottery ticket on sizing.

Sources and notes

Catalog product page

Product listing verified on 2026-10-09.