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Name Dropping
T
HE TERM SPORTSWEAR, ALSO REFERRED to as activewear, was created by American designers in response to
the needs of emancipated women in the 1920s and 1930s who needed functional, easy-care clothing to live their active
lives. New terms have cropped up to describe today’s clamored-for fitness apparel, but it appears that athleisure has won
out over the others.
OCTOBER 2015 •
PPB
• 15
ATHLEISURE APPAREL
Yoga-wear
Yoga pants and fitted tanks and
other pieces that are equally at
home in the yoga studio or at
Sunday brunch. This term is more
specifically yoga-oriented than
athleisure implies, so it doesn’t
represent the whole category.
Soft Dressing
Coined by former Gap CEO Glenn Murphy on a
2014 earnings call to describe the way people are
ditching jeans for fitness pants, which is why he said
that Gap’s Athleta workout wear store chains were the
company’s most promising in sales. While consumer
choice at retail has increasing influence on promotional
wear, the term soft dressing seems to have lost out to
athleisure. It just goes to show, one word is always bet-
ter than two.
SportsCore
Introduced by
GC
magazine in 2015 as the fashion trend of its
target audience, described on
GC
’s website: “Modern man is in a
state of perpetual motion and his clothes should never slow him
down … It’s time to start thinking of the clothes you wear not as
fashion but as tech: They are intuitive, modular, and way-outside-
the-cubicle tools that keep you moving on a frictionless path for-
ward.” This one hasn’t caught on.
Athleisure
A more mainstream
evolution of the 2013
“cozy boy” trend that
described the anti-
menswear, comfortable
loungewear type of
clothing that became
acceptable for guys to
roll out of the house in.