Fitness-wear market stretches beyond black pants

From high-end designers to small-scale startup brands, ‘athleisure’ has come a long way

The degree to which the dreadfully worded “athleisure” market has evolved since the startup days of Lululemon Athletica Inc. can be observed in a carefully curated shop on the Roncesvalles strip.

Ardith, opened by Miranda Bryden in January 2015, has retained the charming leaded-glass shop front of its predecessor store, the long-lived Lady Toronto Exclusives (stout panties; sturdy brassieres), but there any connection to the Edwardian era ends. Ardith is spare in presentation and clearheaded in its objective: to offer what Bryden calls “gym to the street” fashion in a boutique setting.

It’s the lines Bryden carries that must keep Lululemon designers up nights. From London’s Lucas Hugh laser-cut, heat-seamed leggings (the brand is renowned for its high-end technical wear and the company gained considerable media coverage for designing the training gear for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) to the designed-and-manufactured-in-Toronto Michi line, which somehow manages to blend allure, empowerment and athletic prowess. Bryden says that in wearing Michi designs, “It feels like I could be in a Janet Jackson video.” It does look like that.

The Michi bra line takes sport undergarments to a whole new level of Charlotte Rampling-appropriate strapping and mesh. When the crew of Vin Diesel’s XXX: The Return of Xander Cage took over the incomparable Inter Steer Tavern for filming recently, the movie’s wardrobe stylist swept through Ardith and bought out the store’s Michi stock.

It’s worth noting that Michi is one of the lines carried by Bandier, the American upstart that has caught the notice of Forbes magazine for its high-end multibrand incursion into athletic wear, or maybe street wear. There’s nothing “leisure”-like in the concept, really. (The very word suggests elasto-pants and an unpleasant sheen.)

The growing chain is run by a woman, Jennifer Bandier, a former music executive. I mention this because the fitness/fashion market was not meeting the needs of women, or at least certain women. Exercise conscious. Fashion aware. Demanding of high-tech performance.

In a New York Times interview last week, Bandier was described as a fitness-wear seeker who wanted her clothes “to be as stylish as the Frame Denim and Isabel Marant she prefers.” According to the Times, Bandier “scoured the web and found smaller brands, like Toronto-based Michi and Los Angeles-based Splits59. But she couldn’t find a boutique to try them on.”

She opened her first shop in Southampton in the summer of 2014, where, apparently “the beach-body-conscious women of the Hamptons were drawn to the store’s well-edited selection of fash- ionable workout brands.”

Bandier’s new flagship store is in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. It has a fitness studio. So: shop. Take a class.

Bandier carries Lucas Hugh, with its careful detailing and sometimes-stratospheric prices. The line’s Nordica leggings are priced at $420 (U.S). At Ardith, Lucas Hugh pants start at $220 (Canadian) and top out at $320 for its “spark” print pant, made from custom fabric.

“Our customers are busy women with busy schedules,” Lucas Hugh founder Anjhe Mules told the Telegraph last year in addressing the pricing issue. “They are committed exercisers who’d spend that much on a pair of jeans, but actually they wear their gym gear more.”

Targeting this market in this way is demographic brilliance.

Miranda Bryden digs into other aspects of this building upheaval in the market — let’s call it the luxury fitness-wear market.

Fabric sourcing. Milling. Place of manufacture. “It’s another consideration for people carefully considering their environment when buying,” Bryden says. Michi is based out of Liberty Village. “She uses a lot of great Italian mesh,” Bryden says of Michelle (Michi) Watson, who started the line a scant six years ago. Bryden says it’s sexy. On her website, Watson says she was inspired by “boudoir lingerie.” The line was designed to empower women. It accomplishes both.

What does all of this portend for Lululemon?

Not all that long ago, the Lululemon pant was deemed the ne plus ultra in yoga wear, and pricey at that. The market for such gear, including footwear and accessories, was estimated by the research group NPD to be worth $323 billion in 2014. In the past decade, that market has become increasingly fractured, with Lululemon finding itself somewhere in the middle, having lost something of its branded cachet.

Today, it’s facing upstart competition from the likes of Yogasmoga’s Rishi Bali, who last week declared that his company was going to be “better than Lululemon, just more authentic.” Then there’s Prana. And Lolë. Or Zobha. Or Under Armour and the Gap’s Athleta. And so on.

That’s not to suggest that the future is dire for Lululemon, just that it has to figure out how to position itself within it. It recently opened its first incubator, or lab, in Manhattan’s NoHo neighbourhood. The work of lead designer Marcus LeBlanc there has been compared to his earlier designs at Theory. That’s a long way from a yoga pant and suggests that the Vancouver company’s own evolution is a work in progress. Jennifer Wells’ columns appear Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. She can be reached at jenwells@thestar.ca.