The hard work of leisure: healthy life, activewear and Lorna Jane

Abstract

Since the 2000s activewear has grown as a fashion category, and the tropes of gym wear – leggings, leotards and block colours – have become fashionable attire for both men and women outside the gym. This article examines the rise of activewear in the context of an on-going dialogue between fashion and sport since the beginning of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of the Australian activewear label, Lorna Jane, we consider the fashionable female body as both the object and subject of a consumer culture that increasingly overlays leisure with fashion. Activewear can be seen as the embodiment of an active and fashionable lifestyle that is achieved through a regime of self-discipline, and that symbolizes the pleasure in attaining and displaying the healthy and fit body.

Keywords:

• activewear
• fashion
• leisure
• sportswear
• Lorna Jane

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Horton is head of Fashion in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology. Her teaching and research centres on the aesthetic, political and social aspects of fashion design practice across both historical and contemporary contexts. In 2010, Kathleen founded the stitchery collective, a fashion design co-operative that explores innovative models for the production and consumption of fashion in the twenty-first century.

Tiziana Ferrero-Regis is a lecturer in Fashion History and Theory at Queensland University of Technology. She has a professional background in the creative industries and has published in several journals on a range of topics that include memory and history in cultural representations (Recent Italian Cinema: Spaces, Contexts, Experiences, Troubador, Leicester), the politics of fashion, the role of the designer, and fashion and film. From her visits to communities of women workers in the textile and clothing industry in India in the middle of the 1980s, she has developed an interest in the division of international labour and sustainability.

Alice Payne is a designer and lecturer in Fashion at Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include the fashion design process, the Australian mass-market fashion industry and the problem of design for sustainability within the fashion context. She has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on these themes. She is also an award-winning designer and has exhibited in Australia and overseas.

Notes

1. Number of mentions of search term in all editorial and advertising in American Vogue by decade between 1917 and 2015. Search function in The Vogue Fashion Archive.

2. Google Ngram compares instances of search terms across all books in Google Books archive. Search parameters were ‘activewear, sportswear’ between the years 1900 and 2008.