How leggings became a rebellious statement
The humble loungewear staple has become a lightening rod for controversy. But you’ll never part us from our leggings, says Laura Antonia Jordon
IF YOU THOUGHT that baring your nipples, donning a political protest T-shirt or wearing a white dress to someone else’s wedding were controversial clothing moves, then you haven’t done a risk assessment on leggings lately. Because leggings, according to some corners of the internet, are loaded.
In January, the founder and former CEO of posh gym gear brand Lululemon, Chip Wilson, chimed in with some un-spirational tosh to kick off the new year. Talking to
Forbes he bemoaned the brand’s attempts to be ‘everything to everybody… You’ve got to be clear that you don’t want certain customers coming in.’ (Wilson stepped down as chairman in 2013 after saying, ‘Frankly, some women’s bodies just don’t actually work for it,’ after some leggings were recalled for thinning.)
Then, in proof that social media giants
can act swiftly to remove troubling content when necessary, Tiktok deleted the hashtag #legginglegs, which went viral after women began using it as a platform for sharing their thigh gaps. Searches now redirect to eating disorder charity information.
So, yes, leggings are a lightning rod for controversy. Why should we care? First – and I can’t believe we still have to say this – obviously, because there is no such thing as a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ body for anything. There are bodies and there are clothes and you can do with both what you want. Plus, diktats about who can wear what are boring and just one of the reasons why the word ‘flattering’ has fallen out of favour. Second, because we love leggings and, thigh gap or no thigh gap, we can’t quit them.
Thanks to their stretch and elasticated waists, leggings have all the comfort of their adjacent workout-to-slob-out cousins, the trackpant. That makes them, duh, a no-brainer for weekends and working from home days – but, but, but: if sweats are all slouch (with a whiff of lockdown), the legging’s power is in its second-skin tightness, which creates a sleek silhouette and gives them mileage way beyond the gym or the sofa. Trust me, I know, I live in mine (peachy-texture Vuori, pannelled Vaara or a black pair from M&S’S Goodmove collection) – and, at 5ft 2in, nobody ever described me as ‘leggy’. They are the modern woman’s indispensable multitasker: excellent for tucking into knee-high boots and balancing out mannish shirts, with the added bonus of being able to say you wore gym gear this winter – without actually breaking a sweat.
Not convinced? OK, look at Kate Moss who – days after turning 50 – pitched up at the Dior menswear show in black leggings tucked into spiky boots. Sharp! Or see Claudia Winkleman, who wore leggings (she likes the brilliant Wardrobe. NYC) almost as much as she wore tweed in The Traitors season two – for missions and roundtables alike. Victoria Beckham has got the memo too, well, kind of. She was spotted wearing her ‘pantaboots’ – stiletto boot/legging hybrids – at JFK. One wouldn’t recommend working out in those, but Posh might.
That’s the thing about leggings, they can be whatever you want them to be.
WHEN DR RACHEL CLARKE came home from working with Covid patients, the first thing she always did was take a shower.
Desperate as she was not to infect her husband and two children, the virus wasn’t the only thing she was trying to scrub off. ‘You were trying to wash away what you had experienced that day, so you had a little bit of time that was pure, that wasn’t contaminated,’ she explains.
Driving home from hospital, she’d sometimes have to stop and cry over the horrors she had witnessed. But she was determined not to bring that trauma back into the family home. ‘When my kids would tell me about going on a bike ride with their dad for the daily exercise, I couldn’t feel the fun and the joy they had, but I could – almost at one removed from it – by them telling me. And I didn’t want that to be contaminated by what I was seeing.’
And then, in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, she poured the things she couldn’t talk about into her memoir, Breathtaking, which has just been turned into an ITV drama – and could do for burnt-out doctors what Mr Bates Vs The Post Office did for wrongly convicted sub-postmasters.
The drama splices together real-life footage of politicians insisting there’s no need to panic with fictionalised scenes depicting the horrific reality in hospitals, where frightened nurses are making PPE from bin bags. Although its central character, Dr Abbey Henderson, played by Joanne Froggatt, is a composite made up of different doctors’ experiences, her children are roughly the age of Clarke’s own (now 13 and 17).
Clarke co-wrote the script with Line Of Duty’s Jed Mercurio and Prasanna Puwanarajah, both former junior doctors themselves. To make it look as realistic as possible, the actors underwent a medical bootcamp, being drilled in the techniques they perform on screen. ‘We really want our colleagues, when they watch it, to say, “Yes, that’s what it was like, I feel seen by this,”’ says Clarke. But mostly, she wants ordinary viewers to understand how it felt to fight the medical equivalent of a war.
She cried while writing some scenes and still suffers flashbacks. ‘I don’t really want to think about it, it’s too painful, but it will pop up whether I like it or not.’ Though she’s clearly still angry with Boris Johnson
– ‘by all accounts an inveterate liar’ – and a Government she says failed to level with the public or obey their own lockdown rules, the drama’s other clear target is people now trying to claim lockdowns weren’t really necessary. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how many more people would have died if we’d not had lockdowns.’
Her lowest point was the winter of 2020-2021, when Johnson was resisting a second lockdown despite surging Covid rates. ‘The hardest thing for me was seeing the country careering into that wave, which we all knew was going to result in tens of thousands more deaths, knowing that if different political decisions were made potentially that death toll could, if not be averted completely, at least be reduced.’ By January 2021, with the NHS running out of ventilators and ambulances, she was having panic attacks that made her feel as if she was dying herself. ‘It felt like standing on a train track seeing the train coming towards you and not being able to stop it.’
Though Clarke still works in the NHS, she says the pandemic has changed her, making her more outspoken over things she considers wrong. ‘After Covid, I just couldn’t live with myself if I was being part of the problem.’
‘Breathtaking’ is on ITV1 in February