How leggings become new jeans
olesya willow
In august we mentioned the emergence of a new trend - post-training style (après sport). Après-sport assumes that things originally intended for training in a fitness club now fit perfectly into the urban environment: adherents of the style look as if they have just left the gym or are heading into it (although not really). In parallel, heels give way to comfortable shoes like sneakers, sneakers and slip-ons. We tell why this happens: how sportswear and shoes captured the planet, and wearing sportswear items around the clock became normal not only for representatives of sports subcultures - snowboarders or skaters.
The history of the interpenetration of fashion and sport has more than one century. The key point was the 20s with the advent of the cult of the female body and the ideas of sports things for life. So, Gabrielle Chanel introduced sports silhouettes and such materials as jersey into the women's fashion, Jean Patou - a tennis dress with pleats, and Elsa Schiaparelli showed in her boutique Pour le Sport trousers, swimsuits and skiing outfits. Frenchwoman Madeleine Vyonne, although she sewed floor-length dresses in the 1920s, was one of the first to work with the idea of a conscious design created to emphasize the beauty of the body. Inspired by Isadora Duncan’s ballet costumes or their absence, as in Josephine Baker, Vionne abolished corsets, freed the female body and said that “female muscles are the best corset that you can only imagine.”
Today's passion for sports and the appearance of the aprère-sports style recalls the 80s, when women were obsessed with aerobics, running and began to wear leggings with visors outside of sports clubs. Over the past decade, the lifestyle has changed: sport has become more accessible thanks to free applications for smartphones - the most hit are millions of people. If, in the 1980s, girls studied at home on videotapes, today they do the same thing all over the world, using a phone or lessons on YouTube. "Fitness and sport are the main trend in the modern lifestyle. Women around the world are gradually starting to take their bodies more seriously. They play sports first of all for themselves. Consciousness appears, how you look, how your body feels, what you are Our task is to develop a product in which the female body looks beautiful, which will encourage them to go in for sports more often, "says Julie Igarashi, vice president of design for the" Women's training "direction.
Nobody spends so much money on technology, like sports giants, everything to understand what it will really be comfortable for a person
Returned cult of the body. The main heroes of world news were girls with uniforms and at the same time athletic builds: Beyoncé, Nicky Minaj, Rita Ora and Kim Kardashian, on whom crop tops and leggings look best. Sports things create for the body, starting from its forms, and, as a result, they beautifully emphasize the figure. The return of the body cult is also indicated by the appearance of the main trend of next year - transparent things, which we wrote about in the summer. In order to wear transparent, you need to have enough courage and have, in fact, what to show.
Today, comfort and functionality are important, and a couple of years ago, people were not interested in the composition of fabric and technology. We bought a mountain of clothes in the shops, not thinking about what, how and where it was made. No one else spends so much money on technology and tests, like sports giants, all in order to understand what a person will be really comfortable in life. Clothes from soft and weightless materials, pleasant to the body, you want to wear, not only during classes on cross-fit. In sports, there is more humanism, and sports companies advocate for conscious production and reuse of materials, which fashion houses rarely boast.
The trend, as usual, quickly picked up the mass market, but the attempts of democratic brands to make their "sports things" from cheap fabrics raise a number of questions. Nevertheless, H & M were the first to begin to develop a new territory and launched the H & M Sport line at the beginning of this year, where they propose budgeting to assemble a complete set of sportswear. Connect and Mango. This year, Zara overwhelmed customers with its version of sneakers "under adidas Stan Smith". Although there is an absurdity of copying: the Spanish brand sneakers are like the original adidas, only their quality and design are much worse. Apparently, Zara works for the mass buyer, for whom sports shops are an undeveloped territory (and possibly a black hole), and it is much more comfortable for him to shop in Zara.
The main collaboration of the season was the work of the Swedes H & M with the American designer Alexander Wang, whose style is entirely implicated in the sport. Sports are in demand: crop tops, leggings and neoprene sweatshirts from the collaboration bought up instantly. Jennifer Lawrence appears on the red carpet in a sports top and a strict dress. On the catwalks in the shows of the next season are completely sports bra-tops, opening the stomach, and bicycles. There are more brands focused on the design of leggings and crop tops, such as from Norma Kamali to newbies like Live The Process, Charli Cohen and LAAIN. Ralph Lauren launch new Polo Sport line. J.Crew has similar plans. Following H & M and Zara Topshop, together with Beyoncé this fall announced the launch of a full-fledged new business, namely, a new street sports brand. Sections and activewear clothing lines appeared on Net-A-Porter, Luisa Via Roma, Shopbop, Barneys, VFILES sites: they sell items from both their own lines and brands from adidas by Stella McCartney to Norma Kamali. Even a new, emerging health-ready subculture with their love for black sneakers and stripe sweat pants is to some extent a result of the cultural revolution influenced by sport.
The last aspect of the emergence of après-sports against the background of global cataclysms, crisis and rising unemployment is elementary economy and rationality. We spend less on clothes and more on gadgets, looking for new uses for things. Leggings, sneakers, bra-tops, windbreakers, shorts are beautiful and comfortable. Why wear them only once a week (or a month), collecting a bag in the hall? Clothes are clothes, and shoes are just shoes, and you just have to wear them.