A decade of leggings controversy

As reported by the Washington Post, Maryann White, a woman who identified herself as a Catholic mother of four sons, caused a stir on the University of Notre Dame campus by writing a letter to the editor of the student newspaper. The letter, titled “The legging problem,” expresses her dismay at seeing college students in leggings at Mass on campus last fall. It has many incredible turns of phrase, such as, “I wonder why no one thinks it’s strange that the fashion industry has caused women to voluntarily expose their nether regions in this way,” and, “I thought of all the other men around and behind us who couldn’t help but see their behinds.”To get more news about Full Length Legging, you can visit destgjshop.com official website.

The letter also refers to leggings as “a problem only girls can solve,” and describes the women who wear them as exhibitionists forcing young boys to confront their “blackly naked rear ends.” In advocating that Notre Dame students lead the anti-leggings revolution, White asks, “Could you think of the mothers of sons the next time you go shopping and consider choosing jeans instead?”
In response, students at Notre Dame organized a super-casual protest: About one thousand students RSVP-ed to a Facebook event celebrating Leggings Day and agreed to wear leggings to class on Tuesday. PhD student Dani Green told the Washington Post that it was “difficult to tell” who was participating in the protest and who was just wearing leggings because they were wearing leggings. Some students also shared photos of their outfits on Twitter. (This one is actually bike shorts, but point communicated!)

If it all sounds familiar, that’s because the debate about athleisure as pants has popped up dozens and dozens of times. Leggings are never just leggings. Girls and women can never just wear them in peace, and complaints about them can never just be ignored — the extremely old, extremely prolonged conversation about what’s appropriate to wear and what’s appropriate to say about what other people are wearing always seems to become a national news story.
Most fashion bloggers will tell you that leggings first evoked opinions and commentary when they became one of actress and “it girl” Edie Sedgwick’s signature sartorial choices, most notoriously in a Vogue photo shoot in 1965. The quibble there was not that Edie shouldn’t be showing off the shape of her butt, but that she was far too rich and glamorous for sportswear. The 1970s saw a glitzier leggings fad, spearheaded by Olivia Newton-John’s Grease costume and adopted by disco. Then came the 1980s technicolor fitness obsession, and Olivia Newton-John yet again. Leggings never really took a hiatus; they shape-shifted to fit fashion trends throughout the ’90s and early aughts. Histories of leggings regularly overlook the role played by mall culture circa 2006 to 2010. Wet Seal leggings were sometimes, like, three for $10? And you wore them under denim skirts or boys’ hoodies. So as to look terrible! This brief phase of super-cheap, often inadvertently see-through leggings was a gold mine for tabloid bloggers, and coincided unfortunately with the brief heyday of “belted dresses on top of jeans.”

But it wasn’t until the rise of athleisure in the United States that there was a true backlash against leggings. Jump-started by the rise of conspicuous exercise and bonkers popularity of high-end yoga brand Lululemon, spurred by the high-fashionization of streetwear and sneaker cults, and solidified by the participation of approximately one in four working celebrities, it’s become the most popular and most lucrative mode of dressing — particularly in the last five years or so. Kate Hudson’s Lululemon competitor Fabletics debuted in 2013, Beyoncé launched her activewear line in 2016, Reebok signed Gigi Hadid last year, just after Adidas stole Kylie Jenner from Puma. This week, Lululemon reported a record quarter, with earnings rising 39 percent year over year, and recent estimates say leggings alone are a $1 billion industry in the US. The first mainstream burst of wearing workout clothes around as non-workout staples, though, was among college-age women, which was a problem for a lot of people.

Around this time, the phrase “Leggings are not pants” started showing up on mass-produced t-shirts and dedicated Facebook groups and rudimentary memes. In 2010, the Huffington Post published a (rather racist) blog post titled “Leggings Are Not Pants,” which advised young black women to think like Michelle Obama instead of Tyra Banks, and to think twice before dressing like an “urban ballerina.” But the first major battleground for the war on leggings was, of course, middle schools and high schools — where adults imbued the workaday fashion choices of pre-teens with sexual significance.