If you weren’t convinced fashion’s obsession with sports was for real, just wait until you witness a gym rat deadlift in Balenciaga.
On Thursday, the luxury house said its pre-fall collection would include its own sportswear line dubbed “TechWear.” A launch campaign featured images of models in moisture-wicking tights, breathable running shorts and antimicrobial sports bras, made from “ProBody performance fabric.” To be sure, the models were artfully posed near dumbbells and squat racks rather than actually using them. But this wasn’t an ironic take on modern dressing a la Demna; creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli told The Business of Fashion he intends these garments to be worn like real workout gear.
“My initial reaction was that this was going to be a serious thing for them,” said Tom Garland, founder of the research-led brand consultancy Edition+Partners. “Fashion brands now understand the commercial opportunity.”
Balenciaga isn’t alone. From Old Navy to Our Legacy, brands not known for their fitness bona fides are slinging activewear lines complete with hiking pants, running tights, waterproof jackets and even sneakers. Staud, the Los Angeles label best known for its quirky purses and wedding guest dresses, launched an entire sub-brand, Staud Sport, last year.
They’re all trying to grab a piece of the sportswear boom, which has outlived its pandemic roots and evolved into a full-time uniform for some consumers. In many cases, the pivot is working. Old Navy, which launched its first activewear campaign in a decade in May, was reported by Circana to be the fifth-most popular brand in the category by sales in October. Smaller brands are finding success as well: Represent, a 15-year-old British streetwear label, generates nearly a quarter of its revenue from 247, an activewear sub-brand it launched in 2020.
“Before that we were just in fashion for 10 years, so it’s a good change and dynamic in the business that has a differentiation to what we’re used to,” said Represent’s co-founder George Heaton.
Even in a booming sportswear market, there probably isn’t room for this many options. Many of these emerging sports sub-labels will likely release a handful of flash-in-the-pan collections before quietly fading away. Luxury brands like Balenciaga have a checkered history in the category; while Prada Sport is remembered as an athleisure pioneer, there are many more diffusion lines or ill-conceived ventures.
Success probably won’t come from discovering the next great innovation in moisture-wicking polyester – mall brands and streetwear labels know better than to take on Nike or Lululemon on their home turf. Rather, they’ll come out winners by identifying an unexploited niche in the market, and filling it with the right products, sold with the right story.
“It’s less about performance and more about positioning,” said Garland, who has consulted for both sportswear brands and luxury labels such as Versace. “It’s extremely important to consider ‘the why’ and what needs your brand is satisfying here.”
Choosing a Lane
When Nike made a push into trail-running last summer, they sponsored elite athletes like Caleb Olson, who went on to win major trail races last year wearing the brand’s All Conditions Gear and Ultrafly super shoes.
Old Navy went with Lindsay Lohan, whose top sports achievement was probably when her character Maggie Peyton steered a magic Volkswagen Beetle to Nascar glory at the end of 2005’s “Herbie: Fully Loaded.”
Horacio Haio Barbeito, the brand’s president and chief executive, defined the brand’s activewear strategy as “extraordinary product for ordinary people” — something that can be worn for yoga or just casually styled for school pickup.
Old Navy’s strategy checks Garland’s boxes for playing in the sportswear category: the clothes must connect with the “power of the brand,” or meet a specific need for their existing customer.
“You have to consider if they’ll buy it just because of the brand’s power or if they’re buying it to achieve a personal best,” said Garland.
Similarly, Pacsun’s PAC 1980 and ARC lines address a younger teenage customer base that’s more likely to wear activewear to school than while working out.
“A lot of the brands out there that speak to them are a little too serious and too performance-centric, gym-centric, or about competition,” said chief merchandising officer Richard Cox.
For other brands, sports are the point. When Represent launched 247 in 2020, Heaton said the sub-brand was responding to the active lifestyle its predominately young, male customer base had begun embracing. The line is heavy on stretchy cargo pants and boxy graphic performance T-shirts geared towards three activities popular with that demographic: hiking, Hyrox and running.
“Obviously there’s many other fitness angles we can home in but we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin,” said Heaton, who adds that positioning 247 around emerging fitness trends such as hyrox helped distinguish the brand from both larger sportswear brands and competitors within the booming running-fashion space.
Los Angeles based streetwear label Brain Dead has largely positioned its Brain Dead Equipment around rock climbing. Founder Kyle Ng said the sub-label now makes up about 20 percent of the company’s business.
Telling the Right Story
Brain Dead Equipment didn’t gain traction within the climbing community for making the best harness or the most innovative pair of climbing shoes. Instead, its bare-bones gear is defined by psychedelic motifs applied to chalk bags and cotton-hemp T-shirts.
“Skaters wear regular Dickies [pants] because that’s the culture, it’s not because of technical fabric innovation or anything like that,” said Ng. “What you do need is a community and a culture people are excited about.”
And since the sports Ng addresses with Brain Dead Equipment are ones that he personally participates in, it makes for more authentic storytelling when he asks his real climbing buddies to climb rocks or walls when modelling the clothes in a video. That addresses a common problem Garland finds when brands engage with sport, which is that they typically put products on cruise-control and let storytelling fall in the backseat when it should be driving it.
“There’s stories of progress, belonging and identity, and failure or success that emotionally jerk people,” said Garland. “There’s a huge opportunity to tell really interesting stories with great products, and it shouldn’t be one or the other.”
That’s well recognised by Represent. While the brand made significant investment in sports products, going as far as independently producing its own running and training sneakers last year, it knows that it doesn’t have the same firepower to win in any innovation race against Nike or Adidas. But the edge that Represent does have, according to 247’s head Matt Shotton, is storytelling that can emotionally connect with customers who have been invested in the co-founder’s personal fitness journey.
“People see that lifestyle that George Heaton lives and it resonates,” said Shotton, who previously worked for Nike and Adidas. Heaton’s journey from being a regular joe to a fitness guru that’s graced the cover of Men’s Health has lead the brand to sign athletes that have undergone similar transformations such as Russ Cook — a British ultra runner who went from binge-drinking to becoming the first person to run the entire length of Africa.
And even mass-market brands can still find ways to telegraph that they’re taking their sports offerings seriously without signing elite athletes.
Cox said that while Pacsun isn’t necessarily making cutting-edge clothing that helps athletes perform better, he said it constantly evolves its lines to address its customer’s preferences. For women, that meant beginning to embrace modal fabrics and producing styles that weren’t solely focused on sports such as yoga and pilates. Whereas Barbeito credits Old Navy Active’s double-digit growth to leveraging the design resources offered by Athleta — an activewear brand under Old Navy’s parent company Gap Inc.
“Our in-house designers launch [active] franchises and work on innovation and fabrication,” said Barbeito. “Active is one of the more dynamic categories in our portfolio because it offers this novelty and newness year-over-year that’s giving us this great tailwind.”