Explained (2018–…): Season 2, Episode 4 - Athleisure - full transcript

[female narrator] 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."

[laughter]

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?

[woman] Our designers have developed
new fashions for casual living.

- [man] This is a synthetic fiber.
- You mean we make cloth out of that?

[second man] 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.

[man] 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.

[man] Are we wearing more sportswear
because we're exercising more?

- [buzzer]
- [second man] Uh, no.

- [man and woman] 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.

[both laugh]

[narrator] 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...

- [ding]
- ...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.

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

[narrator] 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.

[overlapping chatter]

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.

[narrator] 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...

[man] Radiant from head to toe
in man-made materials.

[narrator] ...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.

[man] 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.

[narrator] Soon, fashion magazines

were filled with ads
for new man-made fibers,

claiming they would free women
from time-consuming clothes-care.

And then DuPont
invented something revolutionary.

I think we need to talk about spandex.

Spandex, first marketed
under the brand name Lycra,

would be blended with natural fibers
to make it more lightweight, elastic,

and flattering to your figure.

It meant that you could create garments

that fit much closer to the body,
but that were so comfortable.

That made it possible
to create form-fitting clothes

without clever and expensive
cutting and seaming.

Once you had lycra,

any old stupid manufacturer
could do body-worshiping clothes.

Body-hugging spandex
revolutionized what we wore for sports.

For swimming, skiing, cycling,

dancing, and yoga.

But there's one big problem with spandex...
It's very clingy...

in areas you may not want it to cling.

- Are you ready to do the workout?
- [women] Yeah.

Now, if you look at the Jane Fonda videos,
they've solved that problem

by having basically a bodysuit
over top of the leotards.

- Stomach tight, buttocks pulled in...
- But then came yoga pants.

I started lululemon

on the premise
that this pant was perfect.

The number one key invention
was the gusset in the crotch.

That's right, the gusset in the crotch.

It's a diamond-shaped piece of fabric
in between the pant legs

that increases coverage and flexibility.

I just basically took that bodysuit
and built that into the pant.

So then it became acceptable for a woman

to leave a sweaty workout
and be out on the street.

Design innovations like this
made skin-tight clothes less revealing.

I want to be able to...
have it be acceptable

that I can go and work out,

take my kids to school,
then show up to work.

And I don't want to break the bank
or have to change on the go.

I want to wear one legging, really.

I think that's why activewear
has become so enormous.

It just suits the modern woman.

Today, American women
are buying more stretch pants than jeans.

But going from this to this took time.

It took quite a long time
before the public adjusted to

what seemed to them
like shocking body exposure.

And that was something that was
gradually mediated by fashion photographs,

by movies, by television shows.

By the early 1960s, almost every American
had a screen in their home

just as the biggest generation
in American history entered their teens.

Youth movements
were also extremely important.

You see that at the beginning
of the 20th century.

You see it again
in the '60s, '70s, again in the '80s.

I mean, it never stopped after that.

TV also turned athletes
into celebrities like never before...

just as professional sports teams
slowly started allowing non-white players.

The number of black players in the NBA
went from three in 1950

to nearly 3/4 of all the league's players
by the early 1990s.

Seeing athletes on TV,
along with their hoodies,

their spandex, and their sneakers
lead to new trends,

and vendors took notice.

They are looking for the cool items

because they've seen it on TV,
and they've been influenced by the fact

that these are what all the kids
are going to be wearing.

The lifestyle of young people
and their habits

and things they're interested in

increasingly have moved away from
formal business-style dressing

towards leisure dressing.

These new idols also inspired the fashions
of a new music genre.

♪ My Adidas ♪

Run-DMC released "My Adidas"
on their 1986 album Raising Hell...

♪ I got 50 pair... ♪

...the first rap album
to crack the Billboard Top 10.

♪ My Adidas ♪

Those lyrics prompted Adidas

to set up an endorsement deal
with Run-DMC,

the first of many partnerships

between a clothing line
and a hip-hop artist.

And those partnerships
helped democratize brands

previously associated
with country clubs and exclusivity.

This is Ralph Lauren,
you know what I'm saying?

Take it back to Polo preppy days,
you know what I'm saying?

For hip-hop performers to embrace that

and sort of translate it in their own way

I think was a real statement
about what status means

and who has access to status
and how it's defined.

Ultimately sort of who owned
the markers of success.

This style came to be known as streetwear.

Slowly, people historically marginalized
from the markers of success

started to be the ones to influence them.

And as hip-hop grew to be

one of the most popular music genres
in the world, that style spread globally.

[man] It started in New York City,

moved out to mainstream America,
and then on to France...

[woman] Japanese teens are dressing,
and, yes, even looking the part.

It's just something
that appeals to me, really.

It's hip-hop, though, isn't it?
It's streetwear.

When you start having that kind of shift
from formal to casual to athletic

to, you know, whatever it-it may be,
all of those things sort of upset

what we know to be,
um, the hierarchy of status,

how we sort of very quickly
aesthetically define people.

Over the decades,
these trends have had different names...

Sportswear, activewear,
streetwear and now athleisure.

But they've all allowed us
to dress more casually,

and that's turned the meaning of clothes
upside down.

Gym clothes can signal wealth
better than fur coats.

Women wear clothes once reserved for men,

and billionaires make public appearances
in running shoes and hoodies.

But while more people
may dress the same way,

that doesn't mean
that they're all seen the same way.

Yes, they have the ability
to walk around wearing hoodies and jeans

because they are white dudes
in Silicon Valley who are billionaires.

Other people without that privilege,

um, don't get to walk around in hoodies.

For centuries,
people have fought for the right

to move freely, safely
and comfortably in public

and to show their bodies how they want to.

Clothing is still a battleground,

and you just need to turn on the news
to see that that battle isn't over.

[male newscaster]
Protesters wore sports jerseys,

sleeveless shirts,
and baseball caps on backwards.

Items banned under a new dress code
in the city's nightclub district.

The fact that he was black
and the fact that he's wearing a hoodie

makes him suspicious walking home.

[man] The mayor of Cannes
is temporarily banning women

from wearing burkinis
at the French Riviera's beaches.

Serena Williams will be banned
from wearing her black cat suit.

Girls wearing leggings
without shorts or a skirt to cover them

will not be allowed on campus.

The company's founder and chairman,
Chip Wilson, he is stepping down

after an uproar over these comments
that he made...

Frankly, some woman's bodies
just actually don't work for it.

We're sick and tired
of our clothing and our bodies

being policed by men.

Athleisure and sportswear
and cultural shifts

have allowed us to value...

personal comfort above...

everything else.

[closing music playing]