While everyone is eagerly awaiting new music from Outkast it seems that one half of the group is trying to do other things outside of the traditional recording industry.

According to New York Magazine Andre Bejamin is trying to tap into the lucrative fashion industry and he’s made announcements that he is starting a new fashion line. Scratching your head confused? Don’t worry me too. Because although I’ve looked at Andree three stacks as being an incredible pioneering M.C. I’ve never looked to him for fashion tips. I find his style to be a mix of androgyny, and farmers clothing. But apparently he’s doing it and guess what? He’s going to bring back the short shorts. Check it out:

André Benjamin (a.k.a. André 3000) likes short shorts. Short basketball shorts, that is, the kind players wore back in the seventies, the kind that end perilously high up the thigh, the kind that Kobe Bryant recently said made him feel “violated” after the Lakers played a half in throwback uniforms. Benjamin pulls off the look with some flair in Semi-Pro, the latest sports-themed comedy to roll off Will Ferrell’s assembly line. He plays the inventor of the alley-oop, and “by the time we started filming, the shorts were like a second skin to me,” he says. “It seems like you can cut through the air a little bit better in them.”

Such images, drawn from college football circa 1935, inspired his new clothing line, Benjamin Bixby, thanks to a documentary he stumbled across on TV one night. Consisting of 70 pieces, the line is currently self-funded (he’s looking for a partner) and, he hopes, will be at Barneys in the fall. Benjamin is a fashion autodidact: He has taken advice from Anna Wintour (who invited him to a Met gala), he has sketched the clothes himself, he has been to Italian factories and Parisian textile fairs. (And by the way, if you’re missing his primary career: He’s also working on a solo album for the fall.)

That mix of application and instinct carries over to his personal style. It takes a certain serenity to rock the resplendent Bixby outfit he recently wore to a Fashion Week party: wide-brimmed fedora, green waistcoat, buttery brown leather riding boots (“vintage”) that pushed his pants up, jodhpur style. He looked more like a wealthy, eccentric caballero than a thirties jock toff, but then, he wants the line to tell stories. Benjamin Bixby, he says, “is a character who’s kind of like your uncle, or your granddad, and he has a closet full of experiences and clothes, and he’s been around the world.”

What do y’all think? Does the man have a chance in hell of creating and sustaining such a dynamic line in a time where you have more followers then leaders? I mean lets be real for a moment, I don’t know a grown man who would try and bring back the short shorts.