![]() It begins in the late 19th century, a sort of Cambrian Explosion moment for basic fashion when sports changed the way young people dressed-both on the field and in the classroom. To Clemente, the athleisure story doesn’t begin in the late 20th century, with the birth of Lululemon. Athleisure is the ultimate breaking down of barriers.” ![]() “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,” Clemente said. Finally, the blurring of yoga-studio fashion and office attire snaps into the long decline of formality in American fashion. Second, the modern fixation on healthy appearance has made yoga pants an effective vector for “conspicuous consumption,” Thorstein Veblen’s term for products that confer status-like “extremely healthy person”- upon their owners. First, technological improvements to synthetic fiber have made products like spandex more flexible, durable, and washable than natural materials. A fashion historian at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, she says athleisure is the culmination of three long-term trends. Read: The psychology of Lululemon-how fashion affects fitnessĭeirdre Clemente has an answer. So, what made athleisure take off so suddenly? Stretchy fabrics have been around for decades. But for years, I’ve been wondering what athleisure’s rise says about modern culture and the way groups decide to embrace one idea and discard another. I’m a fairly boring jeans-and-button-up kind of guy. (Incongruously, athleisure has grown in popularity among teens at the same time that American youth sport participation has declined significantly.)Īs someone who doesn’t attend yoga or spin classes, my interest in athleisure doesn’t have much to do with practicality-or style. According to one survey, the share of upper-income teenagers who say that athleisure stores like Lululemon are their favorite apparel brands has grown by a factor of six in the past decade. In the past two decades, Lululemon has sparked a global fashion revolution, sometimes called “athleisure” or “activewear,” which has injected prodigious quantities of spandex into modern dress and blurred the lines between yoga-and-spin-class attire and normal street clothes. But in strictly financial terms, Chip Wilson’s 1997 session may have been the most consequential yoga class in world history. It was called Lululemon.Īs a spiritual practice, yoga has been in existence for more than 2,500 years. The next year, he started a yoga design-and-fashion business and opened his first store in Vancouver. Wilson felt inspired to mass-produce this vision of posterior pulchritude. He noticed that his yoga instructor was wearing some slinky dance attire, the sort of second skin that makes a fit person’s butt look terrific. What struck Wilson most in his first session wasn’t the poses it was the pants. So, like millions of people around the world, he went to a yoga class. In 1997, a retail entrepreneur in British Columbia named Chip Wilson was having back problems.
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