America, Please Drop the Leisurewear and Put Proper Clothes on Again - Newsweek

At a recent midweek lunch with a group of friends, we did what women have presumably done over lunch for centuries: admire one another’s clothes.

What struck me was not that any of us looked particularly fancy or conspicuously branded. We looked polished but, oddly enough, every outfit at the table belonged to a category that not long ago would have been reserved for the gym, the couch, cooking dinner or the sort of errand you hoped no one would see you running.

I was wearing Gap, two friends were in Alo, and another was in Lululemon. The fabrics were different, as were maybe the price points, but the silhouettes and the proposition were the same: elastic-waist pants paired with a top in the exact same color or print, accompanied by a collective understanding that these combinations constituted being properly dressed.

Ladies and gentlemen, bow down to athleisure, a genre of clothes that has pulled off one of the more successful acts of cultural laundering in recent American life.

These clothes—soft, comfortable and, above all, always elastic—did not merely become acceptable but aspirational. They moved from the margins of the wardrobe to its center and, in doing so, quietly changed the threshold for what Americans consider proper for public life.

Ten years ago, the default uniform of ordinary American casual life was probably jeans and a T-shirt. Hardly formal, certainly not elegant, but still recognizably an outfit, athleisure existed, of course. Leggings had already escaped the yoga studio, and sneakers weren't just being worn to Zumba. Perhaps most notably, Lululemon's success in the early to mid 2000s showed Americans were willing to spend serious money on clothes ostensibly designed for exercise.

But athleisure had not yet swallowed the wardrobe whole, and jeans and T-shirts still reigned supreme...until COVID arrived.

For months, millions of Americans lived at home, where getting properly dressed to move from the bedroom to the kitchen and then back to the bedroom seemed absurd, but remaining in pajamas until late afternoon seemed psychologically damaging. Athleisure solved the problem perfectly: it allowed us to perform the ritual of getting dressed without accepting most of the physical inconveniences traditionally associated with clothing.

And what had been one category of the American wardrobe suddenly had a chance to become its organizing principle.

The fashion industry understood the assignment.

Ashlie Garcia, who spent years working in recruiting and human resources at Amazon and Fresno Unified, remembers the pandemic uniform as the “Zoom mullet."

“Nice top, sweatpants, slippers if nobody asked you to stand up. And the world kept spinning,” she told Newsweek.

Gap Inc. was already talking in 2020 about the accelerating “casualization of style” while Athleta surpassed $1 billion in annual sales. The pandemic did not invent America’s preference for casual clothes, but it dramatically accelerated a transformation already underway. What we once wore around the rest of life became what we wore for the rest of life.

And then the pandemic ended, but lo and behold, athleisure did not. Instead, the industry refined it: softer cuts, cleaner branding and the ultimate act of coordination. Everything became about tasteful neutrals, and companies sold us the top and the bottom separately, performing the economic brilliance of turning a sweatsuit into a $200 outfit.

Garcia remembers that leggings once signaled either that “you'd stopped trying” or that you were “the Pilates mom in the Target parking lot at 10 a.m. with an iced latte and somewhere much nicer to be.”

“Lazy or rich,” she said. Then brands changed the equation: “Brands made it neutral and fitted, put a little logo on the hip, and priced it like it meant something.”

Jonathan LeVian, vice president of sales and marketing at Le Vian, has watched the same transformation happen in business settings.

“I wouldn’t catch myself dead visiting my customers without a suit and tie,” he told Newsweek about the norms a decade ago. “I could go to the same meeting now with a button-down and jeans and be the most dressed-up one in the meeting.”

Two sweat-adjacent garments in different colors say "I gave up" or "I don't care." Make them the exact same shade of espresso, and suddenly they say, I have a point of view. By making comfort clothes polished enough that the distinction between comfort and dress became harder to defend, athleisure conquered American life.

Part of the trick is that the clothes themselves have gotten better at disguising what they are.

“You can get a stretch sweatpant that looks indistinguishable from an uncomfortable suit pant,” LeVian said. “Nobody can even tell.”

The workplace followed. Gallup found in 2023 that just 3 percent of U.S. workers said they regularly wore business-professional clothing, down from 7 percent in 2019. Forty-one percent described their normal workwear as business casual. The broader casualization of American dress long predates COVID, but the pandemic gave it an extraordinary accelerant.

I should disclose here that I am not observing any of this from the dignified confines of a pencil skirt. I absolutely love athleisure. I buy the sets, and while I wait for them to be mailed out, I consider buying more. But I've slowly come to the conclusion that, perhaps, it is time we collectively move on and start wearing actual clothes again.

It's not about athleisure being ugly; it really isn't. It's also not about comfort being some sort of moral failure: given the current state of affairs across the country, I understand needing a bit of respite, even if it's in the form of elastic pants.

The problem is that we have allowed this type of clothing to colonize practically every ordinary part of American life: school drop-off, airports, errands, coffee shops, lunch, working from home and, increasingly, actual workplaces. And that's almost the antithesis of what clothing is all about.

Historically, what we wore helped create distinctions between different parts of life. You dressed for work, for dinner, for travel, and then you came home and changed into something comfortable. Those sartorial boundaries reinforced larger psychological ones: they marked the movement from private to public, from one version of ourselves to another.

Athleisure has flattened all of that into one long, elastic-waisted present.

The airport looks like the school run, which looks like the grocery store, which also looks like the couch, and sometimes the office.

Garcia, interestingly, doesn't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

“Honestly, I don't feel like I lost anything,” she said. “I feel like I finally found an outfit that keeps up with me.”

But even she preserves one sartorial boundary: at the end of the workday, she puts on a jacket before going out. “The jacket is my clock-out,” she said. “Once it's on, I'm off.”

And perhaps that little ritual gets at why any of this matters.

Clothes have always done more than cover us: they tell us where we are and, to some extent, who we are supposed to be while we are there. When every part of life asks the same thing of our wardrobe, it is not surprising that so many parts of life have begun to feel indistinguishable from one another, like the boundaries between online and real life increasingly collapsing in our own heads.

COVID gave us an excellent reason to stop getting dressed. Six years later, the emergency is over, but the elastic waistband remains.

So keep the leggings and the matching sets, sure, but America, please, once in a while, put on some actual clothes.

We survived buttons before. I’m pretty sure we can do it again.