The term athleisure has a somewhat opaque history, but Merriam-Webster, a company that officially added the word to their

dictionary in 2020, after keeping tabs on it for several years, to see if it warranted inclusion,

traced it as far back as a March 1979 issue of Nations Business Magazine, in which the

director of the Sporting Goods Manufacturers' Associations

Advertising and Promotions Department, a man named John Gebauer, said, quote,

the booming popularity of fitness has given birth to a similar boom in apparel and footwear

designed for those who actually participate in sports,

and those who just want to look as if they do. The whole ath-leisure, a new term that has popped up,

market, is in a state of tremendous growth, end quote. Contextually, a quote like this from a person

working within that industry implies that this portmanteau of athletic and leisure was probably being used behind the scenes to refer to developing trends before it was mentioned to anyone outside the industry.

And this mention thus approximates a 1979 or thereabouts coining date. Part of what's interesting about this concept,

though, is how relatively quickly it became ubiquitous. The early seeds of Athleisure, as an

industry-wide trend, might have been planted in the late 70s, and some tiny shoots were seen growing in the 80s and 90s,

but it really took off in the early 2010s and began to explode into the mainstream consciousness

by 2014, when fast-growing, well-financed, highly branded companies like Lulu Lemon,

a company which, arguably, kicked off the high-end

yoga pants as all-day clothing trend around this time, began to spread around the world.

That said, this is a trend that existed long before Lulu Lemon started selling gobs of expensive

yoga pants, and in fact, well before yoga pants

in their modern incarnation were even really a thing. Ath leisure has become so ubiquitous that

it's strange to think that there was a time in which sneakers or trainers were seldom worn

anywhere but on the basketball or tennis court. It's strange to think there was a time

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