A death knell is sounding for a ubiquitous wardrobe staple that has ruled our gym bags for a quarter century: Leggings’ stretchy hold on us may finally be coming to an end.
Recently, youth trend analyst Casey Lewis declared “Leggings are obsolete” in her influential Substack newsletter, After School. The Wall Street Journal called the tight garment “passé,” reporting that legging purchases dropped to 39 per cent of athletic bottoms in the first quarter of 2025, down from 47 per cent in 2022, according to U.S. retail analyst Edited.
Meanwhile, Business of Fashion reported that searches for leggings have plunged since their peak in December of 2020, when many of us doubled down on athleisure as we got overly acquainted with our sofas.
It’s largely a generational shift, as the WSJ shouted with its headline: “You’re a Boomer if You Wear Leggings.” Elder millennial Mindy Kaling responded to this on her Instagram Stories in frustration: “Are you seriously trying to tell me you are supposed to RUN in wide leg pants? Also wide leg pants mean I have to get my workout pants tailored!! I may be a Boomer but also, who has time for all this.”
Though, of course, it was a millennial initiative to wear leggings everywhere from the yoga studio to a night on the town — remember the leggings and pumps look of the late aughts, and the ensuing debate over whether leggings are or are not, in fact, pants?
Now, Gen Z is driving the trend engine, in the gym and out of it. So what are the cool kids wearing instead? Alongside the pendulum swing toward loose-fit denim, they are pairing wider, baggier workout bottoms with tiny tops, which calls to mind a ’90s contemporary-dance studio look.
What’s trending in athleisure now is parachute pants, vintage bloomer-style running shorts, and the 2000s Juicy Couture styling trick of baggy track pants worn with the waistband rolled down. Picture the global girl group Katseye in rehearsals for their recent viral dance campaign for Gap.
Consumers want to match up how they look in the gym with how they look out of it. “As activewear becomes a more integral part of how people dress, and with different forms of movement, yoga and sport woven into everyday routines, it feels natural that the pieces we wear in and out of activity are more connected,” said Jackie McKeown, design director for the Toronto new-gen activewear brand Literary Sport, which debuted at New York Fashion Week last fall.
McKeown said we are moving away from “the rigidity of a single uniform for sport and making space for a broader range of styles within the category.” She cites the roomy Literary Sport May pant, made of lightweight Japanese nylon with a low rise and straight leg, saying it is “designed for those transitional moments around activity, but the stretch nylon makes it fully functional for movement too.”
Obviously, there’s a comfort to looser silhouettes “but they also reflect the shapes we’re gravitating toward more generally.” Tight-on-tight feels like old news.
The influence of Gen Z is clear: the down-with-leggings trend is trickling upwards on the demographic stream. Toronto-based personal stylist Tracy Richardson, who works malls and main streets across the country in the course of her workdays, says she just isn’t seeing people out and about in leggings anymore, even in notoriously casual Vancouver. “Everything is baggy. Everyone, of all ages, wants cargos, wide-legged jeans for the street and track pants and shorts for workouts,” she said. “I personally find tight workout gear, especially leggings, claustrophobic.”
While the traditional legging still reigns supreme for many people’s workouts for practical reasons, Permission co-founder Laura Santino is seeing “a more relaxed, cool-girl vibe” emerge, incorporating retro elements. The Toronto activewear hub sells a variety of leggings from its own and other premium brands — with a focus on inclusive sizing, up to XXXL.
Santino said the hottest trend she’s seeing in leggings now is a flared-leg silhouette, like the Permission tie-wast flare legging with a Y2K-esque low rise, which gives the feel of a wider pant but means you can still do yoga inversions without your pants puddling around your knees.
She’s also seeing increasing traction with their wide-leg trackpants. “We wanted to create an easy-to-style leisure pant that could be worn in a multitude of ways,” Santino said. “We love them styled over leggings for a layered moment when heading to and from Pilates or workout classes.”
As for what to wear on top? “The big top over leggings thing — that inverted triangle shape — is definitely on the way out,” said Richardson. But the tight, cropped tanks — bras, really — that dancers, influencers and teens like to wear with their baggy bottoms can be a trickier proposition for the rest of us. Richardson suggests a fitted T-shirt instead: “Something that breathes,” she says. Consider one with vintage details or print to add a personalized touch to your gym look, a nod to the bigger-picture trend: we’re moving away from a uniform and toward more personal expression.
The legging origin story begins with the invention of Spandex, also known as Lycra, by a DuPont engineer named Joseph Shivers in 1958; with just three pattern pieces, leggings were a logical use for the snug-fitting new fabric. The exercise-wear revolution exploded in the ’80s thanks largely to the Jane Fonda workout and Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical.”
In 1998, Vancouver-based Lululemon launched performance leggings, which would go on to become a kind of cultural short form: like Kleenex is to tissues, Lulus are to stretchy pants.
Competing brands — including athletic behemoths from Adidas to Nike — started focusing on fabric technology, touting specific benefits like moisture-wicking and antibacterial properties. Lest we forget the great sheer leggings controversy of 2013, when a manufacturing mishap resulting in a batch of see-through Lululemon tights caused a scandal that lost founder Chip Wilson his CEO chair for blaming the offending garments’ shortcomings on the body types of their wearers.
It didn’t slow the category’s roll, though. By the mid 2010s, leggings (both flared and fitted) were the pant of choice for teenagers and moms on the school run alike. Mass market brands started churning out leggings as everyday basics, and the saturation reached the point where many women had a dozen or more pairs at varying price points in their drawers. Just this June, Lululemon took the step of suing Costco for selling dupes of its leggings under its house brand Kirkland. Really, the figure-hugging phenomenon has lasted a very long time.
From the stylist’s perspective, it’s a good thing that the functional garment’s outsized hold on us is finally waning. “Please remember, leggings are not pants — exercise clothing is for exercise,” Richardson said. “I am always trying to get my clients to get most of their pairs out of their closets.”
