Once a wardrobe staple, this item now makes you look old

Note the time. Note the date. They passed unmourned, but beloved by many.

Have you heard? Leggings are dead.

Sales overall are dropping and the spiritual mecca of the legging Lululemon laid off 150 people in June for a variety of reasons.

First-hand reports from the pants-y trenches in London and New York make it clear – the fastest way to identify as someone old enough to have watched Sex and the City the first time around is to, claw-like, be holding onto your activewear.

When a 37-year-old friend asked Krissy Jones, owner of the ultra cool yoga company Sky Ting, for her advice about leggings, according to the Wall Street Journal, she had this blunt response: “We’re not wearing leggings anymore.”

“You’re a Boomer if you wear leggings.”

Ouch. But also, true.

Those on the style front lines have called it. “I think leggings might be over,” veteran fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley wrote in the Guardian earlier this year.

In July, trade bible The Business of Fashion solemnly reported: “The reign of legging is over.”

In April, US retail analyst group Edited put out a report titled The Death of Leggings? which noted not only were sales dropping but that major players such as Nike, Adidas and Fabletics have substantially cut back their leggings options by an average of more than 50 percent.

They’re still out there of course, chances are you’re wearing leggings right now – I am – but the Miranda Priestlys of Instagram and TikTok have decreed it: skin tight pants are the dodo of duds.

Leggings now join their mid-aughties siblings, the skinny jean and the ankle sock, in suddenly looking painfully dated.

For two decades, extremely form-fitting pants ruled the fashion roost, since Barack Obama was a freshman senator and we all thought President Bush was the worst thing to happen to the US since the invention of high fructose corn syrup.

It was in about 2005 that leggings, so long relegated to the sweaty confines of the gym, emerged blinking into the bright light of street corners and cafes, the world over.

In 2007, Lululemon was floated on the US stock market and made more than $450 million in one day.

The do-up structured pants industry went into mourning. “We’re scrambling,” Levi’s then CEO said in 2013; Bloomberg called leggings an ‘epochal threat’ to the famed denim brand.

In 2015, the painful ubiquity of leggings absolutely everywhere was deliciously satirised by Skitbox’s Activewear which gave us such home truths as “being hungover in my activewear”. It’s been viewed more than 7.6 million times.

As the decade closed out, in December 2019, when no one knew how to spell ‘pandemic’, Vogue declared: “Leggings … are the look of our time”.

Times are a changin’, though I doubt Bob Dylan has ever once squeezed himself into anything made of Lycra.

Part of all this is clearly nostalgia, the 90s and early 2000s are hot and part of the natural inclination of the yoof to REJECT whatever those just ahead of them hold dear.

Also, what’s hot or not comes and goes, fashion is cyclical, we are all trapped in the ever faster spinning social media-accelerated churn of trends.

But I think there’s something much meatier and more meaningful going on here too.

Leggings were a statement about a certain identity politics, one aligned with the rise of Instagram and wellness culture.

They signalled almond milk lattes, warrior pose and a certain worshipping of self-care and wanting to be seen drinking the green juice. If a smoothie bowl went un-hashtagged in the woods, did it really taste any good?

Gen Z seems way less interested in this sort of performative malarkey.

In the 90s there was a big argument about whether fat was a feminist issue (spoiler alert: yeah duh), I reckon leggings and skinny jeans are too.

The fact they are now on the nose for younger women says something about them no longer feeling the need to contort themselves into clothes that so acutely puts their bodies on display. Suck it male gaze.

In turning their back on leggings, and with the rise of things like the nap dress which is designed to be worn for lounging, sleeping or going out, Gen Z is putting comfort first and disowning the expectations that Gen X and millennial women suffered through thanks to things like years of bikini body specials.

Part of Gen Z’s opting out of the leggings narrative is about refusing to conform.

“Millennials were still shaped by the ‘beauty is pain’ mentality — inherited rules about how to dress and for what occasion,” Marsha Lindsay, founder of London’s Nobu pilates, told Vogue Business in March.

“Gen Z has grown up in a more inclusive environment. Dressing for confidence and individuality is more important than wearing a uniform.”

What has emerged to replace the legging is the BWP – the big workout pant. Think baggy, think hip-hugging, think Salt’N’Pepa in their heyday.

Amongst 18-24-year-olds, there has been a more than 400 per cent rise in searches for “baggy gym outfits” on the now-cool-again Pinterest, Molly Rooyakkers, founder of Style Analytics, told Vogue Business.

Edited’s leggings report suggests the same, with a more than 50 per cent jump in the last year for terms like “boxy” and “loose”.

To quote aughties high priestess Shakira: Hips don’t lie.