How sportswear became fashionable

An affirmative revolution is happening: more and more of us are regularly exercising, and wearing the leggings to prove it. In response, says Lisa Armstrong, the likes of Nike are becoming not only fashion and performance brands, but communities

Twenty-five million women currently train with Nike's two training apps, nike+running and nike+training. At any time of the day or night, says Trevor Edwards, the British-born president of Nike, you can log on to nike.com and observe a Babel of animated feeds (and, of course, purchase merchandise). "You'll find women discussing what they like and don't like about a product," says Edwards, "and also which forthcoming events they're taking part in."

This is a level of engagement that media organisations, fashion brands and governments - especially governments - would kill for. There is, perhaps, something uniquely bonding about getting actively involved in sport, especially if you had a somewhat fraught relationship with it at school. You can practically hear the supportive whoops as you log in - and that becomes an extraordinarily potent marketing tool. "Women are making lasting friendships through Nike-organised events," says Mike Parker.

Parker is American, ergo naturally, effusively, affirmative. And not just American but CEO at Nike, a campus-based brand in Portland, Oregon, where the likes of Mo Farah spend months training and the "Just do it" culture is so pervasive that even the sales staff are referred to as athletes. To put it another way: you don't have to exercise regularly to work at Nike but… you probably do.

If, as Parker asserts, "we're witnessing a running boom like never before", we're also seeing more women - and men - regularly signing up to yoga, spinning, Pilates and HIIT (high-intensity) classes. The recession was meant to kill off gyms - and it's true, some bad ones died. Others have upped their game.

And something else happened. A raft of intriguing new (or new-sounding) packages has emerged, from luxurious "well-being" hubs such as Grace of Belgravia, which offers a "holistic" approach to body and mind maintenance, plus soothingly tasteful cream interiors and open fires, to drop?in, pay-as-you-go, almost-round-the-clock enterprises such as Movers and Shapers, which caters to time-pressed, exercise-smart professionals. Soul Cycle, a near-evangelical workout that involves weight training while cycling on a static bike and being blitzed with ear-splitting music, has queues outside its New York studios. Ballet is back on the scene, or a diluted form of ballet, in numerous barre-based classes aimed squarely at women who have graduated from high-impact, bone-jolting burpees.

Elsewhere in respected university research departments, concerted scientific study is devoted to discovering how brief a workout session can be while still being meaningful. Exercise - and not just yoga - has acquired a "spiritual" dimension. Even the cruddiest gym has adopted the mantra of "mindfulness" in an attempt to captivate those lacking time and attention spans.

Naturally, the kit has been upgraded. Nike may be the market leader with its (almost) lighter than air Flyknit trainers, its Pro Rival Bra that comes in 25 different fittings, its 600 designers and its $5 billion-a-year women's business (?3 billion). But there are others out there on the track.

Lululemon, the Vancouver activewear company that earned notoriety last year when one of its yoga pants styles turned out to be see-through, sold $1.3 billion (?800 million) of clothes in 2013. Shares have since dropped 30 per cent (maybe you can have too much of sheer?) but the brand still does sufficiently well to seem ubiquitous in parts of North America among the chia seed-munching classes. "What's destroying fashion? Lululemon. It's so comfortable it becomes addictive," the New York fashion designer Amy Smilovic remarked when I interviewed her recently in London, before confessing that she'd slipped into some Lululemon joggers for her flight over from JFK.

Nike, Lululemon and the much smaller, but growing, British label Sweaty Betty (40 UK stores, and two in the USA) pride themselves on their technical credentials. Nike patents a new innovation every 24 hours and has signed up scores of sporting lions, from Paula Radcliffe and Mo Farah to two-times grand slam champ Li Na and basketball star Skylar Diggins, not only to promote its credibility in the public sporting arena, but to test-drive it. "They give us the wonderful gift," says Edwards, "of a complaint."

Smilovic laments our drift towards slob-out comfortwear, but the sports brands themselves are constantly refining their brief to produce ever more streamlined, futuristic pieces. Lululemon - or, to give it its full name, Lululemon Athletica - worked hard on its silver-infused thread to treat sweating and markets itself as a performance-first brand, as does Sweaty Betty. But what they all know - along with adidas, the German sports brand that has run a successful joint venture with Stella McCartney for a decade, which it presents to the press during London Fashion Week, and Puma, which has variously collaborated with Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan - is that exercising has become a fashionable lifestyle choice. Exercisers now seek a fashionable edge as well as state-of-the-art technology - hence Sweaty Betty's new collaboration with Richard Nicoll, some of which appeared in Nicoll's catwalk show during London Fashion Week.

Today's star models - Karlie Kloss, Doutzen Kroes - advertise their workout regimes in the same way that Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer did in the early Nineties, minus the DVDs. But that's only because there are so many free workouts on YouTube. Instead, Kloss is a Nike ambassador and there's a gym in New York called modelFIT. Take it as read: the sporty, outdoorsy model is back as a credible - and aspirational - concept.

The endless parade of celebrity green juice-sippers wearing designer sweats on their way to hot yoga means the old T-shirt and ancient leggings uniform that sufficed in gyms in the Noughties no longer cuts it. Today's exercisers want to look sleek, fashionable and pulled together (and pulled in) when they work out, and the results are so desirable that Riccardo Tisci's recent versions of Nike's Air Max trainers sold in Dover Street Market, the ultra-stylish fashion emporium in Mayfair, as will Pedro Louren?o's capsule collection, which doesn't simply dispense with the garish fuchsias that traditionally blighted "feminine" sports gear in favour of nude pink, a colour hitherto only seen in fashion circles, but marries Nike's minimal chafing, Dri-FIT wicking, which directs sweat away from the body and causes it to evaporate speedily, with an embossed mock-croc effect to create nifty little jackets. Expressly designed to look good inside or outside a gym, they typify the new breed of performancewear and will sit nicely on Net-A-Sporter, an offshoot of Net-A-Porter and, in itself, another indication of sportswear's elevation.

From Paris to Portland, there's consensus that the most radical innovations in fashion happen in sports clothes. The catwalk has borrowed so many sport classics over the past few years, including current catwalk obsessions such as jogging pants, Vans and trainers, that it was only a matter of time before H&M collaborated with Alexander Wang to launch a collection crossing the cultural divide between fashion and sport.

Soon there may not be a cultural divide. Dressing as though you exercise (even when you don't) has become one of many desirable fashion tropes. As Amy Montagne, vice president of Nike Women, says: "Fitness is no longer what a woman does, it's who she is."More news:purple prom dresses usa | party dress

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