Sweatpants are fashion designers’ worst nightmare

By Luke Leitch

Sweatpants are not for ever, declared Prabal Gurung at the recent New York fashion week, encapsulating many fashion designers’ darkest fear. Home working and Zoom socialising proved to be an elastic market: in an otherwise miserable year for the clothes business – face masks apart – sales of jogging trousers in America increased by 17% in 2020, compared with the previous year. In March sweatshirts and “men’s loungewear bottoms” joined the basket of supposedly essential items that Britain’s Office for National Statistics uses to calculate inflation.

Now that spring is here and vaccination programmes are under way, the question is whether Gurung is right. Will our yielding waistbands give way to constricting stiff trousers again or is this the end of dressing up?

The ascendance of sweatpants was logical. With no offices, restaurants or parties to go to, comfort has been the deciding factor in most of our clothing choices over the past year. Jogging bottoms, so long a victim of casual snobbery, epitomised lockdown’s fashion upside: the freedom to dress for no one but yourself (and those in your bubble).

Yet what has been liberating for most of us represents an existential threat for fashion designers. “I feel too vulnerable in sweatpants,” said Tom Ford in a recent interview. You bet he does. Because when customers are more interested in cosiness than cut, it’s bad news for tailoring, evening wear and even denim. Just look at all the clothes in your wardrobe that you haven’t worn for a year: it seems improbable that anyone will ever again want to throttle themselves by wearing a tie; stiff shoes are like an ancient relic.

Home working and Zoom socialising proved to be an elastic market

But the crisis for the fashion industry is bigger than that. It’s not just that we want to wear soft, flexible clothes. It’s that, in a global pandemic, it doesn’t seem very cool to care about your look. And that’s a scary prospect for many brands. The rise of sweatpants represents the demise of fashion as we knew it.

In Milan dress is a keenly appreciated art form. People wear mink coats to the supermarket and the cult of blue business suits was exquisitely observed until a year ago. Yet in recent months I’ve taken to walking the dog wearing my favourite pair of sweatpants – a £19.99 ($28) purchase from Sports Direct in London. Many others seem to be wearing something similar. And no one seems to give a monkey’s.

Fashion brands have been hawking activewear and athleisure for decades, and charging eye-watering sums for super-soft tees. But that was when most of us had a delineated wardrobe for particular occasions or moods – we had outfits, co-ordinates, accessories. Now those barriers are gone. Every day is the same and we meet it with the same look (if it merits such a term).

In Milan people used to wear mink coats to the supermarket

Elastic living is here to stay and the challenge for designers will be to give it shape. In seasons to come, brands will thrive only if they rise to the demand for comfort, even when occasions to dress for finally return. Some are already doing that. On the catwalk last month I saw luxury joggers aplenty – most of them cashmere. Every Prada men’s look (and many for women too) was based on what co-designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons called a “body piece”, a pair of knitted long johns apparently designed for going out in.

The bedroom’s influence is spreading – think sleep, not sex. At the recent shows, Paul Smith hedged his bets with a model wearing a dusty-pink trench coat over a pair of silk paisley pyjamas, “for when you’ve been stuck in lockdown and suddenly fancy going out for some sushi, but can’t be bothered to get dressed,” he told me. A company called AZ Factory has coined the concept of “switchwear”, with catsuits to swishy skirts in stretchy knit designed to be an all-purpose solution for comfort dressing, equally deployable for a dinner date, pilates class or duvet day.

In 2013 Karl Lagerfeld denounced elastic waistbands as “a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life, so you bought some sweatpants.” Arguably the past year has proved him right: we have all lost control of our lives and it was a rational response to seek solace close to our skin.

But the rise of sweatpants also represents a victory: it’s finally fashionable to be comfortable. Designers who focus solely on how items look, and neglect how they feel, are doomed to find themselves on the wrong side of history. Suffering for fashion seems ridiculous – almost immoral – when there is so much genuine suffering and grief around.

Prada is selling a pair of knitted long johns apparently designed for going out in

Gurung, however, was probably half-right. One day we will go out again and we won’t all be wearing sweatpants. The fashion pendulum always swings back eventually. Many of us will need some good tailoring after lockdown to hide our expanded waistlines. For most of us the plague year has been formless. Each day is the same and time stretches interminably – rather like our trousers. It’ll feel good to put that shapeless past behind us.■

Luke Leitch is 1843’s style editor

ILLUSTRATIONS: EWELINA KARPOWIAK