Athleisure is mean, so Vuori's "chill" wins
Let's go back to Soffe shorts
20,000 steps a day. AirPod maxes. Waters bopping with lemons. TikTok ‘day in the life’ footage—free from error and spontaneity—shows us how to optimize. But the impulse to self-perfect predates the short-form video hype-cycle mimicry.
Tale as old as time. In college, I had an intense global politics professor who wanted us to see everything in terms of ‘patriarchy." I thought in binary for a few months, seeing everything through a bad-good lens, before realizing that it’s much more interesting to observe human experience, power structures included, with room for mess, play, and nuance. Plucking low-hanging fruit gets old. It’s fun to reach up for the higher branches.
While her dominant perspective didn’t stick, one thing did. During our last class, she made us slam our notebooks shut and look at her. But the maudlin-ass intensity is not why I remember the moment, it’s what she said. The most important thing a woman can do is decide how she spends her time. “Do you want to,” she asked, “spend your intellectual horsepower monitoring caloric intake?”
Ava beautifully covered the normalized time suck that is optimization this week in her piece, “Consuming the girl.” Regiments, she writes, are seen as a regular part of life and we often never question, or even notice, the time they demand. Eventually, I think, we all reckon with this time lost, whether we call it that or not. Emma Cline’s 30-something narrator comes to terms with this mistake and its impact in The Girls. “All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
Athleisure, I believe, is the uniform for misspent time. We wear it while we live for what might be next, moving uncertainly into our futures while power-walking in skin-tight, pattern-less, color-less clothing. Often, it feels mean. It’s restrictive, grippy, unforgiving.
Do we want to spend this one wild and precious life marching around with matcha lattes? Curating ourselves? Maybe. But also, maybe not.
Every Saturday across Manhattan women, like me, slip on (fight on) spandex and hit the sidewalks. Chloë Sevigny bemoaned Manhattan’s athleisure scene in Rolling Stone at the start of the year. “The athleisure and the dogs are taking over, and that’s really unfortunate.”
It’s not just the look, I think, that annoys her, it’s the perceptible, unfortunate vibe of it all. It’s not fun to be around people who are mean to themselves. Self-possession is magnetic. Captivating. Self-punishment, as it turns out, brings down the mood.
Encinitas, where I am writing from, is way more infected by athleisure but the mood is simply not the same. Women here are not gunning down the sidewalk in AirPod Maxes. They’re going for a slow-paced walk. They’re contemplating bunches of bougainvillea and snapping off jasmine flowers before placing them in their unbrushed hair. It’s just—chill.
At the highest level, Vuori has found a way to capture this distinction and it’s why the athleisure brand, I think, is on a rocket ship. ”Chill,'“ the brand urges—over & over again across their high-level messaging: billboards, in-store, on web. Their sets aren’t marketed to stand-out in a dark room while top-40 blares, but to move with you through sun-drenched natural environments.
Vuori’s position taps into a deep consumer/spiritual need: Relax, the brand says, it’s ok. Be in the world, don’t perform for the world. Live, don’t optimize.
The difference in brand atmosphere is obvious at all levels.
Take the tennis creative below. In Alo’s creative, women pose around a tennis court. One leans on the net, a wistful look in her eye, and another concentrates (deeply, apparently) on someone else’s game.
In Vuori’s tennis creative, a woman is on the court, back-to-back with her doubles partner, relaxed with her hands between her legs, a big smile on her face.
Which game would you want to play? The second looks more fun to me.
Maybe we should all go back to Soffes?
See you on the west side highway. XXOO
Fridge would cosign this
Yes