The athleisure revolution eats its children

Just seven per cent of British men now regularly wear a suit to work, according to a 2023 YouGov survey. This is a shame for the generations of children for whom a highlight of the day was picking out daddy’s tie from a large selection every morning. For the men, and the culture, it is arguably a shame, too, because the collapse in formality associated with work – most men now wear some form of casualwear to the office, if they go at all – suggests a collapse in seriousness, discipline and respect for said work.

The turn towards comfort as king, and sexy comfort as king in women’s case, is also welcome. I say this as someone who hasn’t worn a buttoned or zipped up waist in years; someone who, long before it was acceptable (if it is even now), was wearing leggings to the opera because I was cycling there. Also because leggings, zip-up tops, hoodies and fleeces can be had very cheaply, make for easy layers (again, key for the outdoorswoman, urban or otherwise), and are often simply given away by corporations – handy if a parent, sibling or friend works for one.

But the heart of modern athleisure, the bleed of Spandex-rich athletic wear associated with yoga, spinning and pilates and gym workouts (rather than, say, rugby) into the everyday, is not cheap. On the contrary, it is a pricey lacuna in the otherwise natural fibre-obsessed domain of aspirational fashion, and its godfather is Chip Wilson, the boisterous founder of lululemon. In 1997, Wilson had an epiphany while at a yoga class: the clothes the instructor wore were like a second skin, he noted, and made her bottom look fantastic. In that, he knew, there was a market, and lululemon was born, triggering a revolution in apparel and new vistas for both comfort and physical contouring in public.

Before Wilson formalised and exploited the possibilities of new material science, there had been a century of modern athletic wear, roughly tracing the emergence of women as cyclists, tennis players, keen mountain walkers and, in some cases, dancing in nightclubs. Their sporty garb tended to be made of jersey and knits: in 1921, Suzanne Lenglen wore the first calf-length, pleated tennis skirt to Wimbledon, sparking what Vogue in 1926 called an era of ‘daytime fashions offered in Paris… of the sports type. Simple, practical, and youthful, they constitute an influence that is more and more felt outside the realm of action sports in dress for general daytime and resort wear and for travel’.

Even so, as the fashion historian and curator Deirdre Clemente has explained of the rise of athleisure: ‘One hundred years ago, you would have day clothes for the street, dinner clothes for the restaurant, theater clothes, and so many genres of dress. Those barriers have come down. Athleisure is the ultimate breaking down of barriers.’

But not all barriers are broken by athleisure: the one, for instance, between slovenly-at-home and sexy-outside is briskly maintained, in particular, by branded workout clothes, whether a pert pair of lululemon pants and a crop top, an Alo two-piece (Alo spandex bottoms, the influencer’s trouser of choice, will cost you up to £140, roughly £50 more than a lululemon legging), an Athletica calf-length workout pant, a high-waisted Beyond Yoga number, or a patterned outfit from Outdoor Voices, whose young female founder and ex-CEO Tyler Haney swiftly became an influencer-mogul. Outdoor Voices, or OV as it is known, was perhaps the truest breaker of barriers in the sense that Clemente refers to: its garb isn’t as explicitly about bottom-accentuation or fitness class attendance, but rather an attempt by Haney to make ‘activewear’ the soul of the everyday, an attempt to turn ordinary daily activities, like crossing a room or going to the shop, that bit more energetic. Her hashtag for the brand was #doingthings.

But despite the aggressive posturing of the macho Wilson, a father of five, no brand had the clout of lululemon. It got in there with its sexualised vision of physically and financially empowered women, and, for a while, stayed there. ‘To me athleisure denotes a non-athletic, smoking, Diet Coke-drinking woman in a New Jersey shopping mall wearing an unflattering pink velour tracksuit,’ Wilson wrote charmingly in Little Black Stretchy Pants, his 2018 memoir. The ideal customer of the brand, he clarified, is a 32-year-old woman earning six figures who spends an hour on fitness every day. It wasn’t the most ‘inclusive’ vision, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. On the contrary.

All has not stayed well for the company Wilson founded. And for this elasticity-loving observer, the overt sexual packaging of women’s body parts, the smugness, the extortionate prices, the blind loyalty by spoiled teenage girls and yummy mummies has made the slide of lululemon’s empire rather satisfying. This has been another rocky year for the company, whose share price has taken numerous downward hits in recent years.

In January, Lululemon was forced to halt online sales of its Get Low pants, because they turned out to be see-through when wearers were squatting or bending over – a push too far, it seems, even for the brand that wanted to set women’s bottoms free. After a long period of trouble, it was felt that it was best that the company’s CEO Calvin McDonald stepped down at the end of January. His replacement, former Nike executive Heidi O’Neill, appointed last month, is now tasked with reviving the struggling business. 

In 2024, the ‘Breezethrough’ legging faced backlash over the underwear-style seam at front and back and the unflattering cut. ‘I just wish they didn’t look like an underwear line,’ ran a typical Reddit post about the leggings. Perhaps the company should consider appointing a woman as CEO; she might be more sensitive to things like seams and see-through material.

To top all this off, the Texas attorney general is now investigating lululemon for using ‘forever chemicals’ in its products – which it denies doing for the past two years. And so lululemon is, it seems, a fading, or at least a struggling, star in the ‘activewear’ firmament. Outdoor Voices also hit the skids: Haney was ousted amid complaints about workplace culture, returned briefly to the board and then left again in 2021. In 2024 it narrowly avoided insolvency through an acquisition by Consortium Brand Partners and has been resurrected as an online-only brand that is still all about ‘doing things’.

But athleisure is here to stay for women, just like Patagonia in the workplace is for men. The allure of wearing stretchy sexy items under guise of being ‘well’ and ‘active’ is, as Chip Wilson knew, just too great to resist.