Athleisure Transformation

After an action-packed weekend of sporting endeavour, it's a good time to revisit a topic close to my heart, investing in companies that manufacture athleisure wear and active gear.

I read an interesting article in The Atlantic which notes that the trend has a technological origin in the late 19th century when the US Rubber Company began producing shoes with rubber soles, and its target consumers were athletes. A century later, improvements to synthetic fibre made products like spandex are more flexible, durable, and washable than natural materials.

I can remember the moment in 1989 when Nike launched its high-performance, microfiber, polyester fabric called Dri-FIT that moves sweat away from the body and to the fabric surface, where it evaporates. It has transformed road running. No more heavy, sweat-drenched cotton club t-shirts.



Office wear is less formal every year. Wearing the replica strip of your favourite team along with a pair of clean jeans is now just fine. Another noteworthy athleisure trend is that women who wear yoga pants out and about. According to Deirdre Clemente, a fashion historian at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, "the modern fixation on healthy appearance has made yoga pants an effective vector for "conspicuous consumption," Thorstein Veblen's term for products that confer status - like "extremely healthy person" - upon their owners."

We live in an era of increasing food abundance and the fight against flab is never ending. Taking exercise is the only answer! Stocks to own? Nike, of course. Also, I like
Read the whole piece in The Atlantic Everything You Wear Is Athleisure. Yoga pants, tennis shoes, and the 100-year history of how sports changed the way Americans dress.