AS a senior vice president of Colin Cowie Lifestyle, a SoHo-based event-planning company, Jocelyn Greenky Herz, 47, takes great care with how she dresses: “No holes, no threads, no snags, and my jewelry and hair and makeup are pulled together.” And yet Ms. Herz can often be found at work or out to dinner wearing any one of her more than 10 pairs of elastic-waist pants. “If your entire outfit looks very chic, there’s no reason not to,” she said. Her collection ranges from high-end — David Lerner leggings and GoldSign jeggings (each about $150) to mass-market Hard Tail yoga pants ($65 to $95) to what she calls “toss away” jeggings from Forever 21 ($8 to $25), “just as good, by the way,” she said.
Over in Brooklyn, Lisa Berlenbach Dixon, a retail executive turned stay-at-home mom, said she spends most of her time in yoga pants like those made by Lululemon, an athletic-wear company with five outposts in the city. “Before I had my son I could never understand why women would wear them, but now I totally get it,” said Ms. Dixon, 33. “It’s so much more comfortable when you’re standing up, or bending down all day long.”
A mere 4 percent of women in the United States now say they wear strict business attire, with 31 percent claiming to dress completely casually, according to the trend forecasting agency WGSN. Clothing designed for exercise has become so popular that while many retail businesses are closing brick-and-mortar facilities and heading online, Gap’s exercise brand, Athleta, opened its first live store last month. Sales at Lululemon increased 56 percent in the third quarter last year, the company has reported.
On the runways, we have seen luxury sweatpants designed by Alexander Wang ($120) and Michael Kors ($1,000), plus cashmere leggings by Donna Karan ($495). And last October, PajamaJeans, a cotton and spandex boot-cut flared legging shaped to look like jeans, made its debut on direct-response infomercials and the Internet. Steve Heroux, the chief executive of Hampton Direct, which markets PajamaJeans, said that the company has sold hundreds of thousands of pairs and that sales have been increasing in the triple digits each month. “People are living in them,” Mr. Heroux said. “They’re wearing them for just about every occasion, whether they’re going to the movies, a restaurant, doing errands or dropping off the kids. People tell us they’re also sleeping in them.”
We are becoming an elastic-waist nation, and not everyone is happy about it.
Stacie Spychalski Buckley, 40, an Atlanta-based director of operations for a professional sports Web site, won’t wear elastic-waist clothing outside the gym. At work, she said “there are people in yoga pants and track suits; you hear them shush-shush-shushing down the hallways. I’m like, ‘What are you doing? This is a professional place. Wear a sweater set and a pair of pants.’ ”
Kat Griffin, 34, who lives in Brooklyn and edits Corporette, a fashion and lifestyle blog for professional women, agrees. “If it’s a casual day and you’re just working in your office and you’re pregnant and you can’t find anything else to fit, maybe yoga pants are acceptable,” Ms. Griffin said. “But for everyone else, really, get a pair of pants.”
Deborah Lucking, 55, an architect in Denver who has been practicing yoga since the 1980s, is even more of a purist. “I’m actually surprised at the popularity of yoga pants because in my experience, they’re not really that great for doing yoga,” she said. “In a lot of hatha yoga poses, you need skin against skin. In tree pose, or in the eagle, the pants just get in the way.”
Searches for “yoga pants” on Yahoo in 2010 were 10 times higher than in 2009 (shudder inducingly, 57 percent of these searches in the last month were performed by men), but Jennifer Romolini, editor in chief of Shine, Yahoo’s women’s lifestyle community site, thinks they should never be worn to work. “I just don’t think people are going to take you seriously if you’re trying to pull off yoga pants,” she said. “You’re not going to be breaking the glass ceiling.”
And yet maybe women could be forgiven for casting off the restrictive waistbands and narrow cuts of yesteryear; after all, how far is the pantyhose of the corporate-climbing 1980s from the corsets of our pre-suffrage years. It’s 2011: weren’t we all supposed to be wearing silver unitards by now, reading this in our flying cars?
Elastic may well be a feminist issue; the problem, said Stacy London, a host of “What Not to Wear” on TLC and a style correspondent for the “Today Show” on NBC, is that women, especially busy mothers, are sacrificing dignity for comfort. “A pair of jeans with a zipper and a button takes a nanosecond longer, and it says, ‘Hey. I’m important, too. It’s not just about my kids,’ ” Ms. London said. “You’re telling your kids you matter, and you’re setting yourself up as a role mode for them — that you always need to have a certain amount of self-respect and put a certain amount of care into your appearance.”
Ms. London says she is horrified that squishy-midriffed women often substitute yoga pants or leggings for proper shapewear — providing a front-row seat, so to speak, to women’s rear ends and thighs. “The problem in general is that the cut is not very flattering,” she said. “They’re meant for movement, but even if you’ve got the best body in the world, they show every lump, bump, curve and ripple.”
But among women interviewed for this article, there exists a caste system of elastic-waist pants, governing their permissibility for certain occasions. Many said they would never wear jeggings — the thick spandex-infused leggings with seams and pockets sewn on, designed to be pulled on over the hips without opening any buttons or zippers. “Jeggings, that’s not going to happen,” said Nancy Trent, 52, chief executive of the lifestyle marketing and public relations firm Trent & Company.
She doesn’t mind leggings in the office — “people wear them with great boots and great tops,” she said — but yoga pants are verboten. “Whether you’re a warrior going to battle or a policeman or a fireman, there’s a certain uniform,” Ms. Trent said. “When you’re in the right outfit, it helps you to think and do your job better. It’s important to wear work clothes to work.”
Ms. London offered hope for those seeking a stylistic compromise. “There’s a new trend in trousers that do have elastic waists but are made of poly and meant to look like wool or herringbone,” she said. “It’s not my first choice, but they’re sold as trousers and not as exercise pants. It’s different than a full-on Lululemon yoga pant.”
Since 1996, the California-based clothing company XCVI has offered these kinds of structured pants with adjustable waists. “Before we started, there was a lot of spa loungewear that looked the same, like sweat suits,” said Daniela Zeltzer, the company’s communications director. “Our goal was to bring that same comfortable fit as all the loungewear, but add fashion elements to them by using structured elements.” Most of XCVI’s skirts and pants have adjustable waists, fold-over tops, or elastic bands, but they’re made from poplin, a woven cotton much like the fabric of a men’s button-down shirt, or other woven materials — so they can pass for regular trousers.
“Women can wear the same outfit throughout the day,” Ms. Zeltzer said. “They can go from a play date with their kids to a meeting with their client to lunch. They can wear heels for the meeting and flip-flops for the play date, but they can adjust the fit and the look and be comfortable all day long.”
This amount of subterfuge might make some women more uncomfortable than a structured waistband, however. Sally Lohan, the director for United States content at WGSN, thinks it’s time to loosen up about elastic. “With so many people working from home, there are definitely more of us with a casual Friday habit that’s spilling over into the rest of the week,” Ms. Lohan said. “I think it’s more about a crossover of lifestyles and a blurring of activities than a general addiction to dressing down. Jeggings and leggings have been perfectly acceptable attire in many workplaces for a while. It really depends on the style and the styling.”
And the styles show no signs of slowing: In December, Hue, a leading high-end legwear company that features studded, corduroy and even sequined leggings, introduced what appears to be the world’s first skegging: It is part skirt and part legging, sewn together, and, according to the Hue Web site, made of “super soft rayon made from bamboo” — with, of course, a “comfortable elastic waistband.”
The skegging has made the world safe for other hybrids, as well. As winter gives way to spring, we will soon be seeing skapris, a portmanteau of skirt and capri pants. Could unitards be far behind?
From: NY Times