Remember athleisure? It was the fashion bastard child of the millennium: an aesthetic portmanteau of workout wear and weekend wear. The term became official in 2015, when it entered the dictionary, creating an entirely new market sector that reached its apogee during the Covid-19 pandemic, when elastic-waist pants, fleece hoodies and Pelotons became aspirational items.
Now it is once again in the news, along with one of its avatars, Ty Haney. Yet what exactly “athleisure” means these days — if it means anything at all — is unclear.
Ms. Haney, for those who may not remember, founded Outdoor Voices in 2013 as the millennial woman’s answer to Lululemon. Known for its color-block leggings, blue tote bags and exercise dresses, as well as for its “Doing Things” tagline, Outdoor Voices was a runaway success. It pulled in venture capital funding, propelling Ms. Haney to girlboss status and getting her crowned by Outside magazine as the “Queen of Athleisure.”
But by 2020, it all came crashing down. Ms. Haney stepped away from OV amid rumors of misbehavior, mean bossiness and conflict with some of the more seasoned executives that had been brought in. She went on to other etail and athletic-adjacent projects, including an energy drink called Joggy, but without her, OV did not have quite the same momentum. Last year, it was bought by Consortium Brand Partners, which closed all of its stores and, it turns out, turned back to Ms. Haney.
This week, with great fanfare, Consortium announced her return as partner and co-owner, charged with bringing OV back to its roots. Only better, of course.
You can understand the reasoning. The global athleisure market was estimated by Fortune Business Insights to be worth $338.48 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $716.05 billion by 2032. Rival brands like Vuori, OV’s male equivalent, which was valued at $5.5 billion last year, as well as Alo Yoga, are in expansion mode. Why shouldn’t OV get in on the game?
Especially because back when Ms. Haney graduated from Parsons School of Design, she had the big idea that workout clothes should not be limited to workout environments because all life, really, was a workout. It seemed like a revelation.
It was such a good idea, in fact, that it soon became a commonplace idea, with women and men strutting from gym to coffee shop to computer in clothes that telegraphed a commitment to both wellness and cuteness at the same time.
The problem is, at this point, the principles of athleisure are as much a part of fashion — which is to say, as much a part of everyone’s wardrobe — as the principles of streetwear, another subsector of fashion once identified as a discrete market segment that has become part of the sartorial status quo.
“Athleisure is ubiquitous now,” said Valerie Steele, the fashion historian and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. And not just for daywear but evening wear, too.
Simply consider that at the recent ESPY awards, Simone Biles wore an Athleta by Zac Posen gown: a sapphire-beaded number made from the four-way stretch fabric of her favorite leotards with a back inspired by Athleta’s Transcend workout tee. (Mr. Posen is the creative director of Gap Inc., which owns Athleta.)
Or that in Michael Rider’s debut collection for Celine, shown in July, he included a host of leggings for men and women, paired with double-breasted jackets and rugby shirt tunics. Or that Demna, the creative director of Balenciaga, treated track pants like tuxedo trousers. Or that in 2024, Tory Burch showed bathing suits as bodycon cool cocktail wear, after combining her Tory Sport line and her main line, because, she said at the time, that’s how women dressed.
“Luxury brands, especially quiet high-end luxury brands, have borrowed from athleisure, either directly or by adapting elastic waistbands for virtually everything and using fabrics that are technical in nature,” said Jeffrey Kalinsky, the former executive vice president for designer merchandising at Nordstrom.
The point, as Mr. Posen said, is that athleisure, or what was formerly known as athleisure, has now become “a part of the everyday language of getting dressed. A part of the fashion bloodstream, like jeans or T-shirts.”
It’s why there really is not an argument anymore over the question, “Are leggings pants?” An entire generation — more — of consumers has already responded. As far as they are concerned, the answer is yes.
Little wonder that when talking to Texas Monthly about her return, Ms. Haney, who had always professed to hate the word “athleisure,” used words like “fashion forward” and “sexy” to describe the new OV collection, which goes on sale Aug. 5. The product, she said, “is more than matchy compression bras and leggings.”
They’re there, sure, but so are pieces like a crisp white cotton poplin Sun shirt with pink pinstripes, a new “energy dress” with contrast stitching and a Juicy Couture-like cropped zip-up sweatshirt with “Doing Things” embroidered in rhinestones in a Juicy-like script on either side of the zipper. (Juicy, being an O.G. athleisure reference from the early 2000s, was appropriated by Demna at Balenciaga for his fall 2024 show).
Now Ms. Haney has co-opted the look, in a sort of meta-commentary on the way fashion that evolves from low to high to middle, just as categories themselves have begun to meld together.
So perhaps it is finally time to retire an outdated term like “athleisure.” Even “activewear,” which now means mostly performance wear, implying certain technical advances in manufacturing that enable athletic achievement, is sort of fashion dada. Isn’t a suit also performance wear, really?
Perhaps the true takeaway from all this is that the best word for all of the above — the one that really describes Ms. Haney’s new vision for OV — is that old-fashioned favorite: “sportswear.” For decades, it referred to coordinated separates that offered an alternative to the matchy-matchiness of designer clothes, rather than to anything to do with sporting activity. And honestly, it did not make any sense. Until now.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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