Sweatpants: if we wear them, does it mean we've given up?

Sweatpants became a hot topic on Seinfeld between George (Jason Alexander) and Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld). Photo / Getty Images

It's a stretch to label sweatpants fashion, writes Doris de Pont

Are people giving up? When you get around in sweatpants, what Is the message you are giving to the world? Jerry Seinfeld suggests to George, who is wearing sweatpants, that they say, "I give up. I can't compete in normal society so I might as well be comfortable."

When I read of the surge in sales of this item of clothing in the Covid world, Jerry's proposition resonated with me. In parallel, a trend by fashion designers to riff on the theme with luxe sweatpants also demanded further investigation. As a person who has spent a lifetime looking at and thinking about what we wear and what it means, this is a phenomenon I need to come to grips with.

So what exactly are sweatpants - or track pants as we know them locally? Well actually it is right there in the name - sweat and track - pants made for physical activity. Largely unstructured and made from soft materials, they were designed to allow ease of movement, comfort and safety from being injured by zips, buttons and belts while one is exercising. Introduced in the 1920s to facilitate and enhance the ability to participate in sport, they were associated with a healthy and athletic body.

For the next 40 years or so, they remained a niche garment until the emergence of recreational running, AKA jogging. In the 1960s and 1970s jogging, which had been developed by Arthur Lydiard as light aerobic training for his athletes, became a thing. Jogging was an accessible form of running that was available to everyone who was looking for fitness and exercise and the perfect attire for these early morning runs was the tracksuit.
These easy-fit pants and tops were transformed in the 1980s when a new wave of health and fitness arrived in the gym. Aerobics and jazzercise were new ways to raise a sweat and their colourful Lycra, leg warmers and trainers a la Jane Fonda were added to the mix of what became known as activewear. The humble tracksuit, with its muted tones, became marginalised by brash new shell suits with migraine-inducing coloured panels, crispy exteriors and soft inner linings. In this decade too we see the dawning of a crossover from gym to club scene and athletics track to street. Lycra bodysuits became de rigueur on the dance floor in nightclubs and tracksuits became the unofficial uniform of an emerging hip-hop culture and its corollary, break-dancing.

So far so active. Still, so how did this quintessential item of sportswear become the garment of choice for the indolent?

MC Hammer, who made track pants cool.

The answer can be found in the 1990s, the last decade of the millennium and the beginning of the end of fashion as we knew it. With the rise of the world wide web, neoliberalism, globalisation and individualism, what we wore now became a matter of personal choice and incumbent on the individual. Fashion became decentralised with trends no longer set only by Paris, London, Milan or New York but also by places like Seattle, the home of grunge, Los Angeles, the home of MC Hammer and rap and even in Auckland, where Polystyles was nurtured by magazines like Planet. Our consumption of clothing, music, film and entertainment became more segmented locally while we shared commonalities with people from all around the world through the web. The importance of giving expression to the group you identified with began to supersede considerations of appropriateness for the social context in which you were living.

We started to give up "dressing up". Our clothing was transitioning to become lifestyle clothing, clothes for all day and I made these myself, with my label DNA. Our pitch was that our clothes were smart, creative and comfortable enough to get the kids ready for school, to spend a day in the office and then still take you, with good grace, to drinks or dinner. This is the era that saw the birth of "smart casual" and its acceptance in the workplace and often, too, in evening attire.

Sweatpants have become, for better or worse, the official fashion statement of Covid-19. Photo / Getty Images

While the casualisation of fashion set the tone, it has provided few guidelines as to where the limits of acceptability are. Without explicit or implicit boundaries, some people struggle to find a balance that takes into account their comfort and the comfort of those they share space with, so I will outline my thoughts on the matter here.

We all understand that sweatpants are not actually sports clothing - they are sports adjacent - you wear them on the way to or from the physical activity, before and after. By wearing them you may be signalling your intentions or aspirations to take part in sport or you may be indicating that this is a reward, you have earned their comfort. This is the currency promoted by the luxury brands that are currently interpreting the sweatpant, tracksuit and even the shell suit, into high-end, high-cost products. They are pairing sweats with a Chanel jacket or a shell suit with a tuxedo jacket, because you deserve it.

What about the rest of the punters who are behind the Covid surge of sales of ordinary everyday shapeless elasticated-waisted sweatpants? Surely they have not all become incontinent or infantile and in need of convenient easy dressing and undressing? Has Covid-19 unsettled society so fundamentally that we don't see a way forward and could Karl Lagerfeld be right that, "Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants."

Perhaps it is true that we feel we lost control of our lives with the pandemic, that we sought comfort in soft clothes that are kind to our waistline but I hope that when it is over we can think of our foray into wearing sweatpants as a sort of long weekend, an interlude before we gain control again, engage with life and once again embrace proper clothes.