An Academic F*ck You to Chip Wilson's Fatphobia
Behind the Material Girls Episode: Athleisure x Optimization with Anne Helen Petersen
from Hannah McGregor
I’ve been a fan of
’s work for at least a decade; she’s one of my icons of publicly engaged scholarship, and one of the first models I saw of a scholar doing interesting, accessible, conversational writing that is also grounded in appreciation for the critical tools that scholarship gives us. So when Anne agreed to join us as a guest on Material Girls, I was profoundly starstruck. And when she selected athleisure as her topic, I dove into the research process with some real Lisa Simpson energy.I started somewhere familiar: Jia Tolentino’s writing about athleisure and optimization. Her profile of Outdoor Voices for The New Yorker is one of my favourite pieces of her writing, and a perfect example of her ability to dunk so hard on cultural trends simply by describing them. Take this passage for instance:
[Tyler] Haney [founder of OV] did triceps dips while live-streaming from her phone’s front-facing camera. A friendly brown dog named Lupa wandered between mats. People encouraged one another; they whooped when “Shake Ya Tailfeather” started playing. I looked around, mid-squat, eying the toned bodies around me, and considered the extent to which the company’s workforce was less diverse than its Instagram presence. As had been the case during the tree planting, I appeared to be the only non-white person in the group. (“As we grow, it’s a major focus to build a team that reflects the broader community we’re reaching,” an OV rep later informed me.)
What makes Tolentino a particularly adept critic of athleisure is that she is almost squarely centred in the demographic these industries are targeting: affluent professional women living in urban centres with more money than free time and some investment in optimizing said limited time, often by spending said money. Her perspective as a woman of colour can, as this passage demonstrates, position her as just enough of an outsider to see the irony, but she’s not so much of an outsider that she doesn’t see the appeal.
We didn’t delve into this much in the episode, but the relationship between athleisure and whiteness is an important one. It’s there in Tolentino’s Outdoor Voices profile, and present in a different way in the history of Lululemon, which is widely credited with being the company that spawned the athleisure trend. According to Business Insider, Lululemon Chip Wilson has claimed that he chose the company’s name because he thought it was “funny” to watch Japanese people “try” to pronounce the letter L. (My personal animus towards Chip Wilson has more to do with his impact on Vancouver politics, but his racism and fatphobia sure don’t help.) In “Activewear: The Uniform of the Neoliberal Female Citizen,” sports sociologists Julie Brice and Holly Thorpe describe athleisure as “much more than simply casual clothing designed for physical activity. It is a complex entanglement of branding, marketing, fabric, skin, sweat, fat, muscle, consumption, capitalism, environmentalism, gender, sexuality, social media, healthism, neoliberalism, and more.” That “more” undeniably includes white supremacy, which is woven so tightly into structures like healthism and neoliberalism that they’re almost impossible to disentangle.
Take, for example, the distinction between athleisure and streetwear, and the different ways in which these kinds of clothing signify. Both athleisure and streetwear have their origins in activewear or athletic clothing being incorporated into everyday life, whether it’s wearing yoga pants to the office where you absolutely won’t be doing yoga or wearing skate shoes even if you couldn’t ollie if your life depended on it. But where athleisure is linked to whiteness, femininity, and wealth, streetwear comes from urban, particularly Black, youth culture. As Jaya Saxena has argued, “Dress codes — particularly ones barring clothing like sneakers, hats, ‘athletic wear,’ and Timberland boots — frequently target Black customers, while white customers are allowed to dress as they choose.” The difference lies not in the fabrics these clothing are made of or the sports they might have originally designed for, but in the histories and cultures of who wears what.
In my attempt to historicize athleisure as a particular kind of activewear I found a fabulous essay by social anthropologist Kaori O’Connor called “The Body and the Brand: How Lycra Shaped America,” which traces the DuPont Textile Company’s attempt to create a new market for Lycra (their patented name for spandex, which I also learned is an anagram of expands!) right at the moment when the popularity of girdles was declining. Spandex was a WWII innovation – an alternative to rubber – and so, when DuPont was attempting to sell it into the post-WWII market, they started with girdles because they had also, previously, been made from rubber. As Meaghan Clark explains in Refinery29, “spandex’s transformative nature allowed it to be translated into other items of clothing” including Audrey Hepburn’s iconic “stretchy skinny pants.”
Audrey Hepburn basically wearing yoga pants. Photo: Paramount Pictures/Getty Images
Lycra really took off, though, with the aerobics wave of the 70s and 80s, led by celebrities like Jane Fonda. As O’Connor explains, “the aerobic-exercise ethos resonated with other emergent notions of control that had been instrumental in women’s abandoning of the girdle,” particularly control as a thing women had over their own bodies rather than something imposed upon them via external structures: “In the past, women had worn girdles beneath their garments to make the clothes look good; this can be thought of as women being worn by clothes. In contrast, Lycra leggings and leotards allowed women to wear their own bodies. Fitting like a second skin, Lycra enabled women to display a self-created, aerobicized, and empowered body.” It’s impossible for me to divorce the notion of a body that displays its fitness and/as empowerment from fatphobia, ableism, racism, transphobia, and the other structures that shape how our culture expects a successful, liberated, feminist body to look. That body looks thin, white, and cis; it associates success with physical mobility; and it is often proximate to wealth, via the expensive fashions it is modeling.
In attempting to grapple with my own conflict at O’Connor’s linking of body liberation and aerobics, I came across an essay excerpted from historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela’s Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, published on LitHub, in which Petrzela uses Jane Fonda as a figure for thinking through the relationship between fitness and progressive politics, particularly for women. She explains that, for feminist thinkers of the 70s and 80s, group exercise gave women a space to take control over their bodies, to be unglamorous and sweaty and, in the changeroom before and after class, naked in front of each other. For famed second wave feminist Gloria Steinem, “Fonda-style exercise was unmaking the assumption that athleticism was unfeminine and frivolous. The camaraderie of the locker room was a powerful antidote to messages that women’s bodies should look a certain way or existed primarily for male pleasure.”
Still from Jane Fonda’s Workout. Photo: Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Petrzela leans into the political complexity of the moment, explaining that, despite contemporary critiques of the whole aerobics-as-activism concept dismissing it as individualistic and narcissistic (critiques usually coming from men), the women who participated in this culture experienced it as a liberation:
[S]ome who flocked to new spaces like yoga retreats, dance-fitness studios, and jogging trails saw participating in these activities as bound up with the fight for bodily liberation that powered activism for reproductive and civil rights, and a general search for authenticity in an era of disillusionment with so many social and political institutions.
Others created and participated in these new arenas for physical expression as a path to a less explicitly political, but no less personally important, self-possession.
Reading this, I had to remind myself that a form of liberation not being applicable to everyone doesn’t prevent it from being liberatory for some. What can I say, I’m one of those “we need multiple approaches to problem solving at all times” girlies. The issue, for me, is the way some forms of liberation are more readily interpellated into capitalism and white supremacy than others, and, as Brice and Thorne explain, neoliberal-healthism has readily turned women’s bodily self-possession into a mandate for bodily self-discipline and optimization, framing “health as a completely individual affair where, although health problems may originate outside the individual, the solution rests within the individual and their behavior and choices.” What from one angle might look like using bodily autonomy to wrest yourself from the coercive control of patriarchy might, from another, look like blaming multiply marginalized people for the social impacts of health by pretending they can solve structural problems with individual behavioural changes (for more on this listen to every episode of Maintenance Phase).
I love moving my fat body, and frankly, I love wearing athleisure, particularly because I’m convinced that my visible belly outline showing through the sleek contours of yoga pants is a fun fuck-you to Chip Wilson and his claim that “some women’s bodies just don’t work” for his yoga pants. And I also experience on a daily basis the structural inequities that come from being a queer fat “woman” and no amount of sassy participation in 80s-style dance aerobics or ironic reclamation of fashions designed to exclude me will change those structural conditions. But pleasure can be part of our survival kits too.
Being a fat bitch for the gram.
In the spirit of staying in conversation with deep and thoughtful thinkers, I want to hear from you about your relationship to athleisure, fitness culture, and body liberation!
Works Cited
Brice, Julie and Holly Thorpe. “Activewear: The Uniform of the Neoliberal Female Citizen.” In Sportswomen’s Apparel Around the World: Uniformly Discussed, edited by Linda K. Fuller, 19-35. London: Palgrace Macmillan, 2021.
Clark, Meaghan. “What Came First: The Yoga Pant Or The Skinny Jean?” Refinery29, 16 June 2016. https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/yoga-pants-skinny-jeans-trend-history.
O’Connor, Kaori. “The Body and the Brand: How Lycra Shaped America.” In Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk, 207-29. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008.
Petrzela, Natalia Mehlman. “Sweating in Public: On Jane Fonda’s Dance Aerobics Empire and Progressive Politics.” LitHub, 3 February 2023. https://lithub.com/sweating-in-public-on-jane-fondas-dance-aerobics-empire-and-progressive-politics/.
Saxena, Jaya. “Restaurant Dress Codes Frequently Target Black Customers. It’s Past Time for Them to Go.” Eater, 3 November 2020. https://www.eater.com/21546024/restaurant-dress-code-discrimination-prejudice-history.
St. Denis, Jen. “The Billionaire and the Mayor.” The Tyee, 24 October 2022. https://thetyee.ca/News/2022/10/24/Billionaire-Mayor-Vancouver/.
Tolentino, Jia. “Outdoor Voices Blurs the Lines Between Working Out and Everything Else.” The New Yorker, 11 March 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/18/outdoor-voices-blurs-the-lines-between-working-out-and-everything-else
I've worked at a company that sells athleisure and I can tell you, the optimization culture is as intense on the inside as it appears in the marketing. It's a hard job that is supposed to appear effortless, and employees should feel energized and grateful that they're empowering women...by selling yoga pants. It's exhausting.
Thank you for this episode. I would love an entire episode devoted to group exercise classes like barre and aerobics. The section on Jane Fonda and 80's feminism is fascinating!
I wonder at what point spandex became a staple part of mens active wear, whether as wrestling suits or compression shorts. Personally, as A Gay I find the line between sexual and athletic to be SO THIN when it comes to incorporating spandex/lyrca for men.
That could be a bias I’ve developed from existing in a community where some men wear JUST THE TIGHTS with nothing under or over as a dual form of ‘function’ and ‘advertising 😉’
ALSO much of the way men’s active wear is cut seems to have been designed to show off as much muscle mass as possible or to hide a lean body. Very rarely do I see (as a consumer) thin or lean male bodies advertised as wearing active wear, and when I do it is often on site that advertise to gay men where thinness is presented as femininity (i’m talking about twinks). In any case, the models are almost NEVER EVER fat and message that comes through loud and clear is to get the ‘correct’ kind of as big as possible.
Only speaking as a consumer here but again, it seems as though the purpose active wear is to showcase bodies that have been worked for and maintained (thus reinforcing like patriarchy? Heterosexual masculinity? Anti-fatness?)
Loved this epp and the following essay. Please make the hat and other clothes obscure academic words 👏👏