The activewear industry is expected to be worth around $811 billion by 2024 according to Allied Market Research, while the sneaker market alone will likely reach $178 billion by 2026, up from $117 billion in 2020. Verve examines athleisure’s spectacular rise.
As a basketball-obsessed young teenager in the early ‘90s, few things were more important than bagging a pair of Nike Air Jordans and what was, back then in England, a very hard-to-find number 23-emblazoned Chicago Bulls vest (both to be worn both on court and off). Such was my infatuation that my second (and final) pair of Air Jordans was two sizes too big (they were the only ones left in the store), making my skinny legs resemble a couple of clumsy golf clubs out on the basketball court.
My love of playing basketball, however, waned with age and my new infatuation of music – the Britpop scene – leading to the Nike Air Jordans and Chicago Bulls vest to be ditched for retro Adidas trainers and Fred Perry tees.
BRAND NAMES
In 1935, the legendary Fred Perry became the first ever tennis player to secure a career grand slam (winning all four major singles titles in one year) and remains the only British player to have ever done so; also winning Wimbledon three years in a row from 1934 to 1936.
However, the tennis great’s name is now arguably more associated with his eponymous clothing company (coincidentally, his father was a cotton spinner), founded in the early 1950s with the release of the Fred Perry t-shirt. Originally worn by Perry at Wimbledon, the iconic collared tee featured the famous chest laurel wreath logo in honour of the tournament’s symbol: a design that remains largely unchanged to this day. The tennis tops were embraced by the 1960s mod subculture and continued to be worn over following decades by old-school-influenced artists (and their fans) like Blur, Amy Winehouse, and the Arctic Monkeys.
Nike’s Jordan brand – which includes clothing as well as those sneakers adorned by the iconic ‘Jumpman’ silhouette – now accounts for more than one-tenth of Nike’s overall business, bringing in $7.5 billion between 2020-’21. Two years ago, it was revealed Jordan’s four-decade association with the sportswear label had netted the basketballer, widely regarded as the greatest of all time, more than $1.5 billion.
Though Nike boasts a way bigger turnover (in no small part thanks to ‘MJ’), most fashionistas would agree Adidas to be the cooler (not to mention more ethical) brand. It was also the first choice for the precocious young Jordan when he was searching for a shoe deal way back in 1984. Adidas didn’t feel Jordan was the right fit for them (they thought he was too short), while Nike, who had just created their revolutionary ‘air’ technology for their running shoes, offered him a deal that his father said he’d be “a fool” to refuse. Nike thought they’d do well to be selling $4.5 million worth of Air Jordans by the end of year four; in the first 12 months alone, they sold $187 million.
Basketball shoes had made the crossover into mainstream fashion before – most notably Converse All Stars which remain a classic wardrobe staple with arguably wider appeal – but nothing had ever had the immediate pop cultural impact of Air Jordans. (Converse, founded in 1908, is now, incidentally, owned by Nike.)
“For a kid, it was almost like owning a light sabre from Star Wars,” recalls rapper Nas of the early Air Jordans in the extraordinary Netflix Chicago Bulls documentary, The Last Dance. “You needed that shoe to be like him. It was more than a status symbol – you knew that this guy was the guy.”
And so athleticwear hasn’t just shaped fashion but helped bring about cultural change, as noted by fashion historian Deidre Clemente, it’s “the ultimate breaking down of barriers”.
VICTORIANS’ SECRETS
But fashionable sportswear predates even Fred Perry t-shirts and Converse high-tops. Three decades before Perry promoted his tennis shirt on Wimbledon’s hallowed lawns, another grand slam champion, René Lacoste of France, designed a short-sleeve cotton shirt with buttons to aid breathability and a collar that could be turned up to prevent sunburn on the neck. Lacoste’s nickname, ‘the crocodile’ provided inspiration for the brand’s unmistakable logo. (What we now know as a ‘polo shirt’ was originally a ‘tennis shirt’ – a type of top that also found favour among the polo-playing fraternity. When Ralph Lauren launched a range of similarly styled tees with his famous polo player logo, the garment, no matter the brand, became commonly referred to as a polo shirt instead.)
In the 19th-century, blazer-like sports coats were first developed for British and European nobility for hunting as regular suit jackets were too uncomfortable while riding on horseback. The jackets were adopted by US university students and worn with non-matching trousers giving birth to the ‘preppy’ look still popular today, with students incorporating tennis shirts and sports shoes – back then plimsoles – into their everyday wear.
The first patent for the process that created the plimsole – the bonding of rubber soles to canvas uppers – was awarded in 1832 to Wait Webster of New York. Within a few years, rubber tyre manufacturers on either side of the Atlantic, Goodyear in the US and the UK’s Dunlop, began producing their own versions of the plimsole, the latter’s efforts evolving into the Dunlop Green Flash, worn by Fred Perry during his 1930s prime. Like Converse All Stars (also a riff on the plimsole), Dunlop Green Flash continues to be a timeless fashion favourite.
It was around this period that Germany’s Adi Dassler entered the fray with his Adidas running shoe. The ‘brand with three stripes’ gained much publicity when worn by gold medal-winning Black athlete Jesse Owens as Hitler watched on at Berlin’s infamous 1936 Olympic Games.
Women may now rely on activewear for everyday comfort as well as sweating it out at the gym, but Victorian designs were a far cry from Lululemon yoga pants. Throughout the 1800s – and beyond – women were still expected to keep things covered; that’s if they were allowed to exercise at all. In 1806, British magazine La Belle Assemblée advised: “The constitution of women is adapted only to moderate exercise; their feeble arms cannot perform work too laborious and too long continued, and the graces cannot be reconciled with fatigue and sun burning.”
The long dresses of the day only allowed for activities like archery and ice skating, but as the century progressed, so did female sportswear (just), with the evolution of the divided skirt, pantaloons, and eventually, into the 20th century, shorts. But still some cried scandal: “Females who don track shorts and jerseys and run and jump in track meets are just wasting their time, and ours,” ran an Esquire article in 1938. “They weren’t built for that sort of costume.” Even as late as the 1950s, some universities limited when and where women could wear shorts.
And so athleticwear hasn’t just shaped fashion but helped bring about cultural change, as noted by fashion historian Deidre Clemente, it’s “the ultimate breaking down of barriers”.
