Athleisure

The word is a portmanteau of athletic and leisure, and it reached the major dictionaries in the middle of the last decade — but the idea it names is a century old. When Gabrielle Chanel began cutting jersey in 1916, she was working in a knit then reserved for underwear and fishermen’s smocks, and the scandal was precisely that she had taken a garment of the body at rest and given it to the body in public. Every subsequent loosening has followed the same route.

From Jersey to Technical Knit

What changed in the 2010s was not the silhouette but the fibre. Four-way stretch knits, bonded seams, moisture management and moulded soles arrived from performance sport into a market that had stopped dressing for the office, and the technical vocabulary came with them. Luxury houses had been circling the territory since the late nineties, when Prada’s Linea Rossa put technical nylon and rubber into the hands of a luxury clientele; by the end of the 2010s the sneaker had displaced the dress shoe as the most consequential object in the industry, and a great many balance sheets had been redrawn around it.

The Difficulty of Doing It Well

Athleisure is unforgiving of luxury’s usual arguments. A silk gown can justify its price by hand-finishing that a customer will never see; a hooded sweatshirt cannot. What remains is fibre quality, cut and colour — a cashmere-blend jersey that holds its shape after twenty washes, a shoulder seam placed a centimetre off the point, a grey that is genuinely a good grey. The margin for decoration is almost nil, which is why the category separates the houses that understand construction from those that understand branding.

The commercial consequence is that the technical and knitwear specialists are now among the most sought-after people in the industry, and the studios that develop this product sit close to the centre of the business rather than at its edge.