Explained

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."

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?

Our designers have developed new fashions for casual living.

This is a synthetic fiber. You mean we make cloth out of that?

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.

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.

Are we wearing more sportswear because we're exercising more?

Uh, no.

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.

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...

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.

She served up a costume that made the game more interesting.

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.

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.

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...

Radiant from head to toe in man made materials.

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.

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.