Are Leggings Disrespectful? Why One Woman Thinks Yoga Pants Are an ‘Assault on Manners’
With the rise of athleisure, more and more people are weighing in on the cultural implications attached to the trend and its overwhelming presence in society.
Writer Kerry Folan recently penned an op-ed for the Washington Post titled “Yoga pants are comfy. They’re also an assault on manners and a nihilistic threat.” In it, she details her grievances with yoga pants and the messages she believes wearing them in public send.
Folan describes that her recent move from New York City to the suburbs of D.C. enlightened her on the overwhelming presence of yoga pants outside the yoga studio. “Women in my neighborhood go about their entire day in yoga pants and running shoes,” she writes. “Moms with strollers, undergrads on campus, girlfriends meeting up for coffee dates or errands — I have even seen women dressed this way for cocktails.”
Moving from a bustling, fast-paced city like New York, Folan originally felt it had to do with dressing standards in the area and thought she was seeing more of the pants because it was a “suburban trend.” However, she quickly realized that it wasn’t geographical; it was simply athleisure’s growing popularity.
“As someone who cares about fashion, I vote for jeans over yoga pants (or Lycra unitards) any day, but my stance isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about manners,” she writes. Comparing modern dress to older generation’s preferences, she feels that dressing years ago was more manners-focused than nowadays.
“Yoga pants make a statement about comfort and modernity,” she writes. “When we board a flight or run to the grocery store swaddled in cotton-lycra, we are saying to the people around us that our own comfort is our first priority. We are expressing a new kind of modern vanity where dressing down, rather than dressing up, is the power move.” Folan is right — many women do look to yoga pants when running around to do different tasks, like grocery shopping and picking up kids from school, mostly because they’re comfortable and easy.
The D.C. native is so put off by the trend that she even believes wearing yoga pants can be deemed as impolite. In the piece, Folan describes a tutoring session in which her student’s parent noticed she was wearing the leggings and commented on her comfort — which made her immediately wish she was wearing different pants. “It felt disrespectful — elitist, even — to approach our tutoring session with my own comfort so obviously on display,” she writes.
Although Folan maintains this perspective on the leggings’ formality, she also admits that her distaste of yoga pants stems not only from style preference but also through her fear of getting too comfortable. “Part of the reason I love the way New Yorkers dress is that I see it as a metaphor for everything else I loved about the city — the work ethic, the energy, the specific kind of community that comes from collective ambition,” she writes. “Maybe it’s precisely because I love those elements of city life that I am wary of the seductive promise of suburban comfort.”
Folan is far from the only critic of the clothing option; in fact, many men and women have spoken out against the trend, believing that wearing yoga pants outside the gym is informal and even lazy. One man, Alan Sorrentino, penned a column for his local newspaper in Barrington, R.I., in October detailing his issues with the pants.
“On mature, adult women there is something bizarre and disturbing about the appearance they make in public,” he wrote. “Maybe it’s the unforgiving perspective they provide, inappropriate for general consumption, TMI, or the spector of someone coping poorly with the weight or advancing age that makes yoga pants so weird in public.”
Sorrentino was slammed by women’s groups for the note that they believed shamed women for their physical appearance and clothing preferences. They were so inflamed by Sorrentino’s piece that they organized a Yoga Pants Parade in the area to stand up for their beliefs.
“This a wonderful group of people celebrating our bodies and our right to cover them however we see fit,” the description for the event on Facebook read. “And while yoga pants seem to be a silly thing to fight for, they are representative of something much bigger — misogyny and the history of men policing women’s bodies.”
Although the trend garners criticism and approval from both sides, its popularity doesn’t seem to be waning. More and more retailers are jumping on board and introducing athleisure-based lines. The category performs consistently well for brands, and influencers — including celebrities and models alike — heavily promote different athleisure brands on their social channels.
Shoppers gravitate toward athleisure. Research firm NPD Group reported the market to be valued at $44 billion in 2015, a 16 percent year-over-year increase. Simultaneously, denim sales are down about 5 percent. Despite the backlash, it doesn’t look like yoga pants are going anywhere any time soon.
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