The elevation of sportswear into fashion standard has continued apace at Milan fashion week. Labels ranging from Jil Sander to Max Mara included athleisure elements such as bombers and hoodies in their collections, while Donatella Versace, who included tracksuit joggers and velour-like fabrics to her feminist collection, called it “the future” of fashion.
So spring summer 17 is placed to cement the role sportswear has played in the fashion conversation, a dominance that has been building thought items such as Balenciaga’s oversize puffer, the “It” coat for this season. But what happens when a trend, previously aligned with an anti fashion ethos, ceases to become a ‘trend’ and becomes the new fashion normal?
In August, retail website The Robin Report analysed athleisure’s growth, speaking to people wearing sportswear as casual clothing. The journalist, Jan Rogers Kniffen noted a pointed lack of it on the US high street. He said that people were jogging in workout gear but that “during a casual part of the day, there was no athleisure as street wear to be seen.” He went on to predict that while interest in healthy living and working out would not dwindle but wearing workout clothes as our smart/casual dress would do. “Mark my words, I predict this trend in entering the death throes of the uncool.”
The defining qualities that makes a style cool and uncool and subtle indeed. But if the origins of the style are rooted in a fetishisation of clothes associated with recession-era values in a post-industrial landscape, perhaps it suddenly becomes “uncool” when million pound fashion labels start adopting its core values? “I asked myself whether everyone wanted to look poor,” Jonathan Anderson said in this months Vogue Homme “not financially, but poor in textures you know? Is the poor look the underlying trend?”
If these references have become passe through overuse, what will replace it? A fashion spread in the New York Times at the weekend predicted that smart dressing, once the look of the establishment would fill the role played by sportswear. “Formal wear has become the most subversive way to present oneself right now.” Formal as the new normal? It’s a strange thought indeed.
