Fashion & Trends: Adventures In Athleisure Clothing
The best qualities of this gear should translate to ready-to-wear
What is athleisure? Last Sunday, watching more than 50,000 people from more than 100 countries pound their way through the five boroughs in what most of the world thinks of as the New York City Marathon, but what may be more accurately called the World’s Biggest Legging Show, I couldn’t help but wonder.
After all, leggings are ground zero for the term “athleisure”, which grew out of the propensity for women (primarily but not only) to wear their stretchy, tights-like workout garments far beyond the confines of the gym. It has come to encompass the clichéd mum-in-yoga-gear-at-the-school-gates, teenagers and 20-somethings in leggings instead of jeans pretty much everywhere, and the plethora of high-end sweatsuits — cashmere, velvet or otherwise — worn on aeroplanes.
It has been increasingly embraced by designers, who are introducing athleisure lines (Tory Burch has Tory Sport; Derek Lam, 10C Athleta; Cynthia Rowley, Cynthia Rowley Fitness); e-tailers (Net-a-Porter created Net-aSporter, a new subsection on its site, in 2014), and venture capitalists.
Montage Ventures and Winklevoss Capital Management (yes, the ones of bitcoin and Social Network fame) are among the investors in the athleisure e-tailer Carbon38, which opened in November 2013 and which has been so successful that founders Katie Johnson and Caroline Gogolak are introducing their own proprietary athleisure clothing line in December. General Catalyst (Snapchat, Airbnb) and Forerunner Ventures (Warby Parker, Birchbox) are putting their money into Outdoor Voices.
Meanwhile, pioneering British athleisure brand Sweaty Betty is planning to open six new stores in the United States next year, tripling its brick-and-mortar American presence.
Athleisure is now so ubiquitous that it is due for inclusion in the next update of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, according to Emily Brewster, an associate editor, having graduated from “word we’re watching” to fullfledged noun. It now “meets all our criteria for entry”, Brewster said, specifying that the term has “significant use in a variety of sources over an extended period of time”. (They trace its first usage to 1976.)
Yet in many ways, it seems, the more we use athleisure, the more confused we are about what it means. According to Brewster, Merriam-Webster will define athleisure as “casual clothing designed to be worn both for exercising and for general use”. But Julie Igarashi, the vice-president for global designs for Nike women’s training, who is presumably something of an expert in clothing worn for exercise, sees it differently. “We don’t use the terminology ‘athleisure’ at all,” she said. “It’s not in our vocabulary. We talk about ‘How do we layer silhouettes and colours and prints for the most holistic approach?’. But not that.”
Burch said: “I’m trying to figure it out. I had never even heard the term until a few months ago, but it has to do with how women are dressing today, and the question of how you look put together and casual at the same time, with an emphasis on function.”
For his part, Lam said that he considers leggings “one of the blights on contemporary design”, but that athleisure “has to do with a modern reflection of urban and suburban activities. We always had clothes inspired by sports, polo being a good example. But now instead of being about jumping on a horse, it’s about jumping on a SoulCycle”.
It all left me scratching my head. So, to better understand what exactly “it” was, I attempted to wear an athleisure wardrobe for a week, from matching workout gear (leggings, sports bra, warm-up jacket) to neoprenelike, yoga-like pants (stretchy, tight, with slightly flared cropped ankles) that came with a ribbed sweater just slightly longer at the back (cut to cover the derrière) and a matching neoprene jacket.
Not to mention a cavernous neoprene bag that could be used for toting gym gear but was so light it was even more effective for toting reporting gear (notebooks, pens, various digital devices). And what it taught me was twofold.
First, although matching fashion exercise gear may make some people feel more ... well, co-ordinated, it only made me feel like a big faker, because my usual workout fallback is an old T-shirt and black leggings, the better to telegraph to others my amateur status, and the fact that I am trying to think about what I am doing, not how I look (which I know is still thinking about how I look, in a reverse-snobby way, but it’s unavoidable).
And second, and more important, the single biggest misunderstanding on my part, as well as many others, about the whole athleisure trend is that it involves clothing you work out in and then continue to wear. It does not. No designer thinks you are going to do boot camp, or some other such activity, and then wear exactly that clothing all day (because, frankly — yuck, unless you didn’t sweat at all during your workout, which is another issue). Indeed, most brands call the actual workout stuff “activewear” — clothing that is performance-based. As if we don’t have a complicated enough nomenclature as it is.
Rather, athleisure is about a certain sartorial value system that places comfort and functionality, as expressed in workout clothing, on the same level as style, and that communicates to the rest of the world that you place health and wellness on the same level in your own life. That says that the best qualities of workout gear — it is body-aware but not constricting, it is washable, it is nonwrinkle, it is like pyjamas you can wear out of the house — are qualities that can and should translate to ready-to-wear.
Indeed, I actually wore the yoga pant/jacket combination to work, and not only was able to indulge in my propensity for scrunching up in my chair, pretzeling my knees to my forehead while thinking, and otherwise contorting myself in unusual work poses, but received a surprising number of complementary queries from colleagues who admired its cut and wanted to know the designer. (Answer: Tory Sport.)
Which confirms my long-held suspicion that the most logical name for athleisure would actually be sportswear, except in the illogical vernacular of fashion (the one where spring/summer shows take place in September and October), sportswear is already taken, and refers to the system of (relatively) relaxed ready-to-wear separates made popular by American designers of the 1930s and 40s like Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin as an alternative to the head-to-toe looks of the grand European houses, and which most of us wear in our regular lives.
So instead we have its bastard child: a bad word for what is a meaningful development. We live in an age that puts fitness on a pedestal, and this is its result. As Caroline Gogolak of Carbon38 said: “It’s not a trend, it’s a cultural shift.”
What is athleisure? It’s an expression of contemporary identity telegraphed to the rest of the world via clothes. It’s fashion.