[female narrator] Imagine two customers walk into a luxury store.
One is wearing a dress and a fur coat.
The other is wearing a jacket and gym clothes.
Which would you guess would be able to spend more money?
When researchers asked employees at boutique shops in Milan
that question in 2013,
their answer was overwhelmingly the person in gym clothes.
But even as recently as the '90s,
wearing sweatpants in public was a TV punchline.
Again with the sweatpants?
Know the message you're sending to the world with sweatpants?
You're telling the world, "I give up."
[laughter]
Because for thousands of years,
clothing more or less followed the same rules.
The quality of your fabric and tailoring was a status symbol.
If you could afford it, you hired a tailor or seamstress.
Clothing clearly separated the rich from the poor
and men from women.
There used to be a lot of things that women needed to do
in order to present themselves to be accepted.
And we're breaking those barriers,
and here we are, and leggings are taking over the world.
Today, men and women wear a lot of the same things.
Some of the world's richest people dress like anyone you pass on the street.
And high fashion looks to streetwear for inspiration.
Activewear like this has become a global market worth over $300 billion.
It's almost a quarter of all the clothes we buy.
How did that happen?
How did we start dressing so casually, and why do we do it?
[woman] Our designers have developed new fashions for casual living.
-[man] This is a synthetic fiber. -You mean we make cloth out of that?
[second man] Research in miracle fabrics has created a clothing revolution.
I'm here for the spandex.
And I just love how fashion is finally just becoming more and more cultural.
I want to wear my working-out clothes in my day-to-day life.
[man] It was more casual,
but at the same time, you could go anywhere.
Yeah, the word "athleisure" probably came in--
I don't know what--
it's some-- somewhere around 2011, 2012,
and it was almost like a joke.
[man] Are we wearing more sportswear because we're exercising more?
-[buzzer] -[second man] Uh, no.
-[man and woman] Athleisure. -Athleisure.
Wear gym clothes and still look fabulous.
-Do you work out in those pants? -Yeah, I think so.
-But you haven't? -No, I haven't.
[both laugh]
[narrator] While the term "athleisure" may be new, the trend definitely isn't.
And it all started with free time.
Free time is associated with the ruling class.
I mean, throughout history, the ruling class had leisure
because servants or slaves were doing all of the actual work.
But by the early 20th century,
life was getting better for average people in industrializing countries.
New time-saving technologies and pressure from organized labor
ushered in regulations on work hours.
The average work week dropped from 65 to 46 hours
in the span of a single lifetime.
One of the biggest drops was in the U.S.
What you find by the beginning of the 20th century
is that people of the middling sort start to have more leisure time
so they also can participate in sports.
Indoor gyms sprung up in cities across America.
That concept had been recently pioneered in Germany,
inspired by the ancient Greeks.
The word "gymnasium" actually comes from the Greek "gymnós,"
meaning "naked," because the original gym clothes...
-[ding] -...were nothing.
And that would've been a lot less constricting
than the outfits of gym-goers in the late 1800s.
But then their clothes started getting more comfortable.
That's because gyms were private spaces segregated by gender,
which meant women could wear new designs like bloomers
that would've been scandalous on city streets.
At the risk of arrest,
women campaigned to make those more comfortable styles acceptable.
Because at the time, women's clothes could be extremely restrictive.
Wealthy women sometimes needed help getting dressed.
But once women were able to play sports in college
and bicycles took off in cities...
those casual clothes stopped being so private.
And that's when things really started to change.
Just look at tennis outfits.
In 1900, players wore ankle-length skirts, long sleeves, and corsets.
Then skirts got shorter and shorter.
Tennis players like France's Suzanne Lenglen
became style icons.
[man] She served up a costume that made the game more interesting.
[narrator] Her signature knee-length pleated skirts,
sleeveless tops, rolled stockings, and headbands
helped her play the sport better,
and young women started copying her look as a progressive statement.
By the 1920s,
Vogue magazine regularly featured tennis-inspired looks on its cover.
Clothes made for sports were becoming mainstream fashion.
What you see in America by the early 20th century
is a kind of blurring of those things.
So something like a sweater,
which you originally would wear to sweat in
while you were in active-leisure pursuits,
then became something that you would wear to look casual and sportive.
[overlapping chatter]
I certainly feel much more comfortable playing in shorts
because my skirt doesn't flap around when I putt and when I walk over hills.
[narrator] Clothing that allows people to move freely and comfortably--
almost all of it began as sports apparel.
Sneakers come from croquet, Henley shirts from rowing,
and turtlenecks come from polo.
That new casual American style became known as sportswear.
Commercials like this one
advertised these clothes as comfortable, easy to wash...
[man] Radiant from head to toe in man-made materials.
[narrator] ...and made out of plastic.
For almost all of human history,
textiles were made from either animals or plants.
Worms gave us silk, sheep gave us wool,
goats gave us cashmere, flax plants gave us linen,
and cotton shrubs, of course, gave us cotton.
If you look at cotton,
it was readily accessible to most everybody,
and it was grown pretty much all over the world,
so everybody had access to it, but it has limitations.
Cotton can hold about eight percent of its weight in water.
For wool, it can be up to 30%.
These wool swimsuits weighed eight pounds when they got wet.
But then scientists discovered how to make a totally new kind of fiber in a lab.
The magic of modern chemistry
rocketed us into a new world of modern fabrics.
In the span of a few decades, the chemical company DuPont
introduced the world to all of these synthetic fibers.
First, there was nylon.
DuPont marketed the silk-like fabric to women
as an alternative to the scratchy wool stockings of the time.
They were a hit.
[man] On the run come the ladies. Free nylons just for the scramble.
It may only prove that a woman wants to be a knockout
even if she has to KO her friends to do it.
[narrator] Soon, fashion magazines
were filled with ads for new man-made fibers,
claiming they would free women from time-consuming clothes-care.
And then DuPont invented something revolutionary.
I think we need to talk about spandex.
Spandex, first marketed under the brand name Lycra,
would be blended with natural fibers to make it more lightweight, elastic,
and flattering to your figure.
It meant that you could create garments
that fit much closer to the body, but that were so comfortable.
That made it possible to create form-fitting clothes
without clever and expensive cutting and seaming.
Once you had lycra,
any old stupid manufacturer could do body-worshiping clothes.
Body-hugging spandex revolutionized what we wore for sports.
For swimming, skiing, cycling,
dancing, and yoga.
But there's one big problem with spandex-- it's very clingy...
in areas you may not want it to cling.
-Are you ready to do the workout? -[women] Yeah.
Now, if you look at the Jane Fonda videos, they've solved that problem
by having basically a bodysuit over top of the leotards.
-Stomach tight, buttocks pulled in... -But then came yoga pants.
I started lululemon
on the premise that this pant was perfect.
The number one key invention was the gusset in the crotch.
That's right, the gusset in the crotch.
It's a diamond-shaped piece of fabric in between the pant legs
that increases coverage and flexibility.
I just basically took that bodysuit and built that into the pant.
So then it became acceptable for a woman
to leave a sweaty workout and be out on the street.
Design innovations like this made skin-tight clothes less revealing.
I want to be able to... have it be acceptable
that I can go and work out,
take my kids to school, then show up to work.
And I don't want to break the bank or have to change on the go.
I want to wear one legging, really.
I think that's why activewear has become so enormous.
It just suits the modern woman.
Today, American women are buying more stretch pants than jeans.
But going from this to this took time.
It took quite a long time before the public adjusted to
what seemed to them like shocking body exposure.
And that was something that was gradually mediated by fashion photographs,
by movies, by television shows.
By the early 1960s, almost every American had a screen in their home
just as the biggest generation in American history entered their teens.
Youth movements were also extremely important.
You see that at the beginning of the 20th century.
You see it again in the '60s, '70s, again in the '80s.
I mean, it never stopped after that.
TV also turned athletes into celebrities like never before...
just as professional sports teams slowly started allowing non-white players.
The number of black players in the NBA went from three in 1950
to nearly 3/4 of all the league's players by the early 1990s.
Seeing athletes on TV, along with their hoodies,
their spandex, and their sneakers lead to new trends,
and vendors took notice.
They are looking for the cool items
because they've seen it on TV, and they've been influenced by the fact
that these are what all the kids are going to be wearing.
The lifestyle of young people and their habits
and things they're interested in
increasingly have moved away from formal business-style dressing
towards leisure dressing.
These new idols also inspired the fashions of a new music genre.
♪ My Adidas ♪
Run-DMC released "My Adidas" on their 1986 album Raising Hell...
♪ I got 50 pair... ♪
...the first rap album to crack the Billboard Top 10.
♪ My Adidas ♪
Those lyrics prompted Adidas
to set up an endorsement deal with Run-DMC,
the first of many partnerships
between a clothing line and a hip-hop artist.
And those partnerships helped democratize brands
previously associated with country clubs and exclusivity.
This is Ralph Lauren, you know what I'm saying?
Take it back to Polo preppy days, you know what I'm saying?
For hip-hop performers to embrace that
and sort of translate it in their own way
I think was a real statement about what status means
and who has access to status and how it's defined.
Ultimately sort of who owned the markers of success.
This style came to be known as streetwear.
Slowly, people historically marginalized from the markers of success
started to be the ones to influence them.
And as hip-hop grew to be
one of the most popular music genres in the world, that style spread globally.
[man] It started in New York City,
moved out to mainstream America, and then on to France...
[woman] Japanese teens are dressing, and, yes, even looking the part.
It's just something that appeals to me, really.
It's hip-hop, though, isn't it? It's streetwear.
When you start having that kind of shift from formal to casual to athletic
to, you know, whatever it-it may be, all of those things sort of upset
what we know to be, um, the hierarchy of status,
how we sort of very quickly aesthetically define people.
Over the decades, these trends have had different names--
sportswear, activewear, streetwear and now athleisure.
But they've all allowed us to dress more casually,
and that's turned the meaning of clothes upside down.
Gym clothes can signal wealth better than fur coats.
Women wear clothes once reserved for men,
and billionaires make public appearances in running shoes and hoodies.
But while more people may dress the same way,
that doesn't mean that they're all seen the same way.
Yes, they have the ability to walk around wearing hoodies and jeans
because they are white dudes in Silicon Valley who are billionaires.
Other people without that privilege,
um, don't get to walk around in hoodies.
For centuries, people have fought for the right
to move freely, safely and comfortably in public
and to show their bodies how they want to.
Clothing is still a battleground,
and you just need to turn on the news to see that that battle isn't over.
[male newscaster] Protesters wore sports jerseys,
sleeveless shirts, and baseball caps on backwards.
Items banned under a new dress code in the city's nightclub district.
The fact that he was black and the fact that he's wearing a hoodie
makes him suspicious walking home.
[man] The mayor of Cannes is temporarily banning women
from wearing burkinis at the French Riviera's beaches.
Serena Williams will be banned from wearing her black cat suit.
Girls wearing leggings without shorts or a skirt to cover them
will not be allowed on campus.
The company's founder and chairman, Chip Wilson, he is stepping down
after an uproar over these comments that he made...
Frankly, some woman's bodies just actually don't work for it.
We're sick and tired of our clothing and our bodies
being policed by men.
Athleisure and sportswear and cultural shifts
have allowed us to value...
personal comfort above...
everything else.
[closing music playing]