POLO Shirt, Jeans And Tennis Shoes: Changing American Fashion Clothes

In 1997, a retail entrepreneur named Chip Wilson in British Columbia province was uncomfortable with his back.

So he went to yoga classes just like millions of other people in the world.

In the first training, the most touching Wilson is not the posture, but the trousers.

He noticed that the yoga instructor wore tight clothes, showing his body and body.

Inspired by Wilson, in second years, he began to run Yoga design.

Business, and in

Historically, yoga has been in existence for more than 2500 years, but from an economic point of view, Chip Wilson's class in 1997 may be the most valuable yoga class.

In the past 20 years, Lululemon has launched a global fashion revolution, blurring the line between yoga and dynamic clothing and ordinary clothes.

A survey shows that the proportion of high-income teenagers who like sports and leisure shops such as Lululemon has increased 6 times in the past 10 years.

(surprisingly, sportswear is becoming more and more popular among young people. Meanwhile, the participation of American teenagers is significantly reduced.

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As a person who does not participate in yoga or cycling lessons, I am right.

Not much interest.

I am a rather boring person.

And the shirt guy.

But over the years, I have been wondering what the rise of competitive sports brands is.

Yoga has existed for thousands of years, and the elastic fabric has existed for decades. How did the two combinations suddenly become fire?

Deirdre Clemente, a fashionable historian at University of Nevada Las Vegas in Las Vegas, is self identified. She thinks this is the result of the joint action of the three long-term trends. Of

First of all, the technological progress of synthetic fibers makes spandex and other products have more advantages than natural materials. Secondly, the persistence of modern people's healthy appearance makes Yoga Pants an effective carrier for "conspicuous consumption". Finally, the fashion and office wear of yoga hall reflect the long-term decline of American fashion.

For Clemente, the history of sportswear did not start with Lululemon in the late twentieth Century, but began in the late nineteenth Century, when sports changed the way young people dress - whether on the playground or in the classroom.

In other words, when I asked Clemente to explain the sudden rise of sportswear, I really didn't know that the impact of sportswear on the way Americans wore was a long process.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that all modern fashions are linked to sportswear.

There were two reasons for the change in the late nineteenth Century.

In 1892, the United States Rubber Company began to produce rubber bottom shoes, and the target consumers were athletes.

Although the popularity of lawn sports and tennis has been declining for decades, nowadays almost all the most popular sneakers in the United States are sports shoes.

Like yoga pants, tennis shoes are also beyond the scope of sports clothing.

Clemente told me about it.

At the same time, sports were springing up in American universities.

However, because there is not enough money or willingness to buy non sports clothes, many people can only wear sportswear to class.

Sportswear first appeared in Europe in the nineteenth Century, because they liked hunting or riding, but they found it difficult to wear these suits.

Young American students learn from this style, make some adjustments, sometimes put their sports coats and matching pants together, for outdoor sports such as golf.

"Polo shirt" was originally called "

"In 1920s, the French Rene Lacoste was a grand slam tennis champion. He was dissatisfied with the typical long sleeved sportswear of that era.

To make it easier to run on the pitch, he designed a short sleeved cotton shirt that could unbutton the buttons in the front and add a pulping collar to protect the players from the sun.

This kind of shirt is very popular, and other companies like Brooks Brothers in England have adopted similar designs for polo players.

Today, Americans do not hesitate to use the word "polo shirt" to describe a daily dress, which has the same origin as yoga pants and sports.

Clemente wrote in "Dress Casual" that shorts may be the most popular style in sportswear.

Shorts were only sportswear at the beginning, but older people were very disgusted with it.

In 1930, a group of newspaper editors at Dartmouth College (Dartmouth College) organized a school wide short pants protest campaign, calling on men to "enjoy the full freedom of their legs". Later, by the middle of this century, shorts were almost visible in the streets.

Sportswear is also revolutionary for women.

In the past, Europe had to tie up the waist, East Asia had to tie feet, and the history of a woman's fashion was full of the handicap brought by male grotesque aesthetics.

For most of nineteenth Century, female athletes wore long skirts on the court and on the court.

Bicycles swept the country in the 1890s.

For women, it is difficult and dangerous to wear long skirts that may be entangled with spokes, which also leads to the demand for more reasonable clothing in modern life.

The company gradually provides more "dynamic" clothing for young female athletes, including short skirts and button collar tops.

The more revolutionary ones are separate skirts, trousers and even shorts, which allows women to ride bicycles safely.

But even in 1950s, Clemente found that schools such as Penn State University were trying to limit the time and place to wear women's shorts.

The rise of T-shirts is also related to the campus movement at the end of the nineteenth Century, and has become the fashion of fashion. Cultural critics lament the popularity of sweaters in women.

The first batch of modern sportswear (similar to those made for warm skin) is essentially a sweater worn by rowing teams or golf teams to sweat and lose weight.

On campus, these young men, soon, and young women may have put on sweaters to show them to participate in campus sports.

However, the sweater is too comfortable, not only confined to sports, so the students began to wear sweaters everywhere.

Like the yoga pants of a century later, the use of sweaters is also evolving.

At first, it was about sports, but it soon became an appreciation of an active way of life.

Not everyone accepts such a change.

In 1936, a columnist for Esquire wrote, "women wear sports shorts and sweatshirts and run and jump in track and field competitions, not only wasting their time, but also wasting us."

However, in the past 80 years, shorts have become shorter and tighter, because the advances in synthetic fiber and other materials make shorts more flexible and more comfortable.

In the last century, the driving force of western fashion change was mainly for clothes designed for certain activities for other occasions.

For decades, Levi Strauss jeans are mostly worn by men who work in factories and farms, but now they are worn by lazy people. Watches are invented to keep soldiers in punctuality during the war, and to some extent they have become status symbols today.

After talking to Deirdre Clemente, I opened my closet and saw my three polo shirts, four shorts, two jeans, five sweaters, four pairs of tennis shoes and three sports coats.