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Call it Revenge of the Jocks: From Milan to New York, racy athletic stripes are the motif of the moment, starring on a mix of authentic, straight-from-the-playing-field pieces and chic designer looks for both day and night. Scoring points here—the leggy little black dress outlined with white. By Laura Whitcomb for Label. fitness sports bra
Editor’s Note: Ahead of Vogue World Paris, a celebration of the intersection of fashion history and athletics, we are resurfacing “Fashion Pumps Up,” by Katherine Betts, photographed by Arthur Elgort, which was first published in the January 1994 issue of Vogue. Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Ariella for Nubest & Co.
Ralph Lauren has seen the future and it is sports. And he’s not alone. On runways from Milan to New York, designers as diverse as Rifat Ozbek, Anna Sui, Isaac Mizrahi, and Yves Saint Laurent have poached the graphic stripes of streetwise Adidas sweats and splashed them onto everything from tiny tops to sexy knit dresses. There wasn’t a collection for spring ’94 that didn’t have at least one flirty tennis skirt, gym-worthy T-shirt, or pair of waffle-soled sneakers. Karl Lagerfeld even sent a pair of beige-and-black Rollerblades careering down the Chanel runway while muttering something about how despite a season of soft silhouettes, “the body cannot be ignored.”
Still harder to ignore are the athletic artery of bladers flowing through New York’s Central Park and the stampede of “street hikers” (as L.A. Gear executives affectionately call their sneaker-obsessed customers) pounding pavements, tennis courts, and basketball courts all over the world in a veritable melting pot of athletic gear—from dirty canvas Converse high-tops, high-tech Air Huaraches, and preppy Stan Smiths to boldly colored hockey jerseys, logo-festooned T-shirts, and striped track pants.
These are people who, as Lauren would say, “are partaking of life,” but downtown in New York’s SoHo, armies of dead-serious fashion groupies are stomping around in Adidas Gazelles and turquoise blue Puma Suedes. (Just to jog the memory, those are the models that were very popular before sneakers became as sleek and sophisticated as fast cars.) They don’t wear them to work out, they wear them to work. And, thanks to trendsetters like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, they wear them out at night, too. At clubs from New York to London, the cutting-edge dress code is entirely Adidas inspired—whether a hot zip-up-the-front warm-up-suit dress in shiny baby blue nylon by Label (a new fitness-inspired line backed by the rap record label Tommy Boy) or a spaghetti-strap version from another line called No Such Soul. The shoes to match? Adidas Gazelles, naturally. Heck, if Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons has her way, even those die-hard black-clad, avant-garde fashion followers will be bouncing along in red velvet high-tops next spring.
“It’s part of the honest, no-hype nineties attitude,” says Adidas president Peter Moore, by way of explaining the surge in popularity of the company’s signature three white stripes on a black background. “Fashion has picked up on the retro simplicity of Adidas.” And Adidas has, in turn, picked up on fashion’s fascination with its gear: It has brought back three old sneaker styles already, and two more reintroductions are in the works.
Fitness gear meets formal wear, right: Isaac Mizrahi trims warm-up pants with tuxedo-like touches of satin and pairs them with a French-cuffed, wing-collared shirt. Giving lips natural-looking color: Cover Girl's Continuous Color Lipstick in In the Nude. Left: Getting a jump on spring’s sporty look— DKNY’s skinny striped dress in fashion’s current favorite color, white.
Write it off to fashion’s recent back-to-basics movement, or blame it on Michael Jordan, but fitness—as well as the deluge of athletic wear flooding the streets—has hypnotized designers in much the same way that the now familiar mantra of consumerism, JUST DO IT, has pumped up America.
“Fashion in the 1990s is going to be about fitness, not about clothes,” says Lauren, whose new gymnasium-like Polo Sport store on New York’s Madison Avenue is teeming with customers young and old snatching up metallic silver ski jackets, 1930s-style tennis dresses, and tried-and-true equestrian jodhpurs that will work on and off the playing field. “People are responding to health, they’re liking their bodies, they’re saying, ‘Hey, I wanna look good.’ In active clothes you feel your body. It’s a simple sensibility, but it has a great sexiness.”
“Americans are obsessed with fitness; that’s why I’m obsessed,” echoes Mizrahi, who cut graphically striped referee shirts out of silky knits, turned the country-club-bound tennis dress into a sexy little knit number, and gave sweatpants a bit of class with drapey matte jersey for spring. “It’s about gyms and running and people exercising, but it’s also about wearing the most comfortable clothes in the world. And people are going to wear these clothes no matter what, so why not give them style?”
Yves Saint Laurent’s twist on the classic stripe scenario, right: He runs a band of white down the front of a slim stretch of black. Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. Left: Adidas’s signature stretch leggings turn up with a scaled- white cotton shirt. Polo Ralph Lauren for Boys shirt.
“Hey, it’s what we all wear, it’s the way we all live,” agrees Donna Karan, who sent an army of bright, graphic tank dresses with the obligatory stripes up the side trotting down her DKN Y runway under the kind of billowing anoraks football coaches wear on the sidelines on rainy days. Karan created her very own version of the high-tech cross-trainer for DKNY (with an inverted swoosh trademark). But she’s not the only designer who’s into fitness-inspired shoes: Calvin Klein paired his sexy, athletic black underwear for his less-expensive CK line with Teva black nylon and rubber river-rafting sandals, and in his first Anne Klein collection, Richard Tyler merged sneakers with espadrilles.
Designers are no strangers to the fusion of fashion and fitness. Pioneers of American sportswear like Claire McCardell set the trend in motion by cutting simple shapes of informal fabrics in the 1940s. And long after a DuPont chemist named Joe Shivers invented Lycra in 1958, legions of designers found fashion inspiration wherever fitness went—from Lycra-lined aerobics classes to Timberland-treaded mountain trails. What had started as a small, clubby kind of approach to running in the late 1970s exploded into a full-fledged fitness revolution in the 1980s. Women were aerobicizing en masse, and they wanted to flaunt it in the kind of curvy shapes and innovative stretch fabrics designers like Azzedine Alaïa were sculpting into dresses. But they also wanted the comfort that comes with the high-tech fabrics they’d grown accustomed to in workout clothes. Designers took note: Norma Kamali adopted sweatshirt fleece for ready-to-wear. Calvin Klein cut sweats out of cashmere. Donna Karan turned virtually every underpinning into a bodysuit. Karl Lagerfeld teamed neon-bright biker shorts with Chanel tweed. Ralph Lauren outfitted the U.S. America’s Cup team and sent their gear down the runway.
Even when the skintight eighties silhouette eased up, fitness’s fabrics and comfortable shapes endured: In the nineties, suits are cut to move, and the if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it approach to design has been reinvented with transparency—a trend that’s grown to near nakedness for spring ’94. Whether in the form of a soft, flowing chiffon dress (Calvin Klein) or a see-through mesh “skin dress” (Karl Lagerfeld), the message is clear: You have to have one serious body.
The fitness fixation has reached its current emotional high, however, thanks to people like Nike chief Phil Knight, who—with one big swoosh—gave sneakers and athletic gear glamour, status, cool, and a competitive edge. It took Michael Jordan donning his baggy shorts, Madonna squeezing into a slinky Adidas-inspired dress, and Andre Agassi wearing girdle-like biker shorts on the tennis court to make actual fitness gear fashionable. Now, suddenly, Puma Clydes—the sneakers christened with Walt Frazier’s nickname in the early 1970s and later unofficially endorsed by Los Angeles gang members—are hip; kids on the street are slapping down $140 for Air Jordans; synthetic fabrics once reserved for football jerseys or sneaker stripes are turning up on designer clothes; and sneaker designers are coming up with two or three new models every month as opposed to the old standard of fiddling around with one model for years. Today fitness is fashion.
Stripes shine at night, racing down the sides of a lean, low-slung sequined skirt, left. Jeanette for Jeanettics skirt. School Apparel top. Right: Nonchalant layers—a cropped top, a slender tank, and roomy pajama pants—get piled on in the freewheeling manner of warm-up gear. Future Ozbek cropped top. Hanro tank. Sulka pajama pants (sold with matching top). An easy way to protect skin from the elements—with Cover Girl’s Protective Skin Nourishing Moisturizer SPF15.
Actual sports gear—as opposed to designers’ interpretations—has cleared a once unnegotiable hurdle, leaping from the wrong side of the tracks to the prestigious addresses once reserved for Chanel suits, BMWs, and cellular phones. Sure, you can still buy the latest high-tech gear at the discount stores along Newark, New Jersey’s Market Street, but you can also buy it at big, flashy Nike Towns and downtown Manhattan’s Reebok Station, where it comes with gentrified names like Breezewalker, Weathermax, and Princess. Even Barneys’ new Madison Avenue store sells golf cleats among the rows of Robert Clergerie boots. And at Bergdorf Goodman there are $350 walking shoes for sale in the posh second-floor shoe salon. Former L.A. Lakers guard Byron Scott was prophetic when he plugged Reebok in 1990 saying, “A lot of people are into BMWs. I’m into gym shoes.”
“Athletes are a very major influence on young people today; they’re like movie stars,” says Lauren, who has cleverly tapped into the status-oriented mentality of sports by appealing to the 80 percent of Americans who don’t necessarily buy sneakers for a specific athletic purpose—those who might not “Do It” but certainly want to look as if they do. “We have a line in the new store called Active Trainer. You can go to the gym or to the movies in it, but it has an athletic look. Athletics today represents youth and feeling good, and I think everybody wants that, whether you’re 15 or 50. What’s been missing is style in this kind of clothing.”
It doesn't take Ralph Lauren to wake up the fitness world to that fact. Increasingly, companies like Nike, Reebok, and L.A. Gear are responding to fashion’s fascination with athletic gear by streamlining their products so that they can go to the gym and to the local coffeehouse. “We try to stay as performance oriented as possible,” insists Jim Riley, vice president of apparel design and merchandising at Reebok. “But now with heavy-soled boots conquering the street, we have to think about that, too.” The result: a pair of Reebok Jams that look exactly like Doc Martens—the boot that’s put a deep tread mark in the $6 billion sneaker business.
The crossbreeding doesn’t stop there. Back in the design studios of such fitness giants as Reebok in Stoughton, Massachusetts; Nike in Beaverton, Oregon; and L.A. Gear in Los Angeles, designers take inspiration from such disparate sources as perfume bottles, hockey uniforms, mail-order catalogs, and, of course, fashion runways. It comes as no surprise, for example, that as fashion designers began deconstructing clothes several seasons ago, shoe companies like Nike and Reebok did the same, turning out sneakers that “exposed the technology” in much the same way a peek under the hood of a car would expose coils, motors, and honeycombs. More recently, Donna Karan sent anorak-inspired dresses, A-line skirts, and long trench coats in glow-in-the-dark silks down her spring ’94 runway at about the same time L.A. Gear was getting ready to introduce its state-of-the-art running shoes that have a Lumitex fiber-optic panel in the tongue to light them up at night.
Much as the executives of these companies would like to think that they don’t look to fashion for inspiration—“We’re strictly performance driven,” snips one Nike exec, while L.A. Gear president Mark Goldston throws around terms like meaningful demonstrative technology—their designers do. “Let’s face it, we don’t live in a dreamworld where what’s functional will be appealing,” says Nike designer Kathleen McNally. “We emphasize the function aspect of a product, but we also think about the street potential. We”re inspired by distressed fabrics, a gritty, more urban look. It’s not about thong leotards anymore; it’s about a superathletic look that has a more rock ’n’ roll attitude to it.”
Function isn’t the message of advertising anymore, either. Where sweat was once the great stimulus for sneaker sales, now fitness companies have turned sports into a metaphor for life with ads that target passions and states of mind. One Reebok ad for its hip, streetwise Boks line of “athleisure” shoes taps into the listlessness of Generation X with phrases like “Be careful. It’s an easy-listening world out there.” And in an attempt to attract more female consumers, Nike recently created a campaign that equates working out with falling in love. “The idea was not to make the ad so sports specific,” explains Nancy Monsarrat, divisional advertising manager at Nike. “We’re widening the net by leaving the interpretation open-ended, so you could relate it to a relationship or an athletic activity. It’s just more about life.”
Sound familiar? “My clothes are about living,” echoes Lauren. “A big part of how people live their everyday lives today is active, whereas years ago it wasn’t. You used to see a kid with his grandfather, and the kid would be wearing sneakers and the grandfather would be in a suit. Now they’re both in sneakers.”•
COVER LOOK: Two newsmaking trends for spring—fitness-inspired fashion and the return of pretty color—meet on model Niki Taylor, who sports Chanel’s azalea-bright jacket, white tee, and a pair of signature beige-and-black blades that careered down the Paris runway. Echoing fashion’s colorful thinking: the move toward pink tones in makeup. Here, Cover Girl’s Remarkable Lipcolor in Fabulous Fuchsia. Jacket and tee, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. Suspenders and blades, Chanel. Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Brigitte Reiss-Andersen for Jacques Dessange.
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