On a Monday afternoon in January, four NYU sorority girls are huddled in front of a mirror on the ground floor of the airy Soho flagship store of Alo Yoga, the low-cut, logo-heavy athleisure brand that has become the unofficial outfitter of $42 boutique fitness classes from L.A. to Miami. Today, the central tables are covered in “candy-heart pink” bra tops, leggings, and sneakers, just in time for Valentine’s Day, as Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber’s 2010 duet “Eenie Meenie” blasts from the speakers.
Twenty-year-old Mercy, wearing a limited-edition Parke sweatshirt from its New York City pop-up, is looking for a new puffer jacket. For these girls, Lululemon is the “OG,” but they aren’t shopping there today. “I haven’t bought stuff in the last year from Lulu, but I’m wearing Lulu right now and I wear Lulu every day,” says Clara, 19. As they see it, Lululemon is for exercising and Alo is for looking cute. “Alo is very ‘Pilates girl’ with the socks and the sets,” says Mercy.
A block away from Alo is a newly opened Lululemon. Its natural-wood fixtures and salmon terrazzo-tile stairs call to mind another peak millennial brand, Glossier, whose subway-tile-covered store is just around the corner. The wildest color I can find upstairs in Lululemon’s women’s section is eggplant purple. I walk over to the leggings wall, where a dozen mannequin legs model the brand’s famous styles. First in line is the Fast & Free, a running tight I bought ten years ago and haven’t had to replace since.
In the 2010s, Lululemon turned its $100 black stretchy leggings into a status symbol and the foundation of a fast-growing new category with a corny name: athleisure. Over the course of a decade, women traded their jeans for leggings and men traded their khakis for stretchy pants, and suddenly everyone was wearing sweat-resistant polyester at grocery stores and airports and out to dinner. Lululemon expanded at a breakneck pace, becoming a real threat to Nike and Adidas and racking up more than $10 billion in annual sales with 796 stores and 39,000 employees. But in 2024, Lululemon’s sales growth started to slow, and by 2025, sales actually shrank in its most important market, North America. As Levi’s and Gap boasted about the comeback of jeans in wider, looser styles, it was clear Lululemon was not simply overstretched but uncool.
Just look online, where a million little competitors are stealing Lululemon’s customers one sweaty selfie and Substack newsletter at a time. Alo is for West Village girls and their followers. Adanola is for Ssense shoppers who are done with Alo. Gymshark is for lifters who drink creatine. Vuori is for networking in Marin County. Set Active is for 20-somethings who love Parke. Sporty & Rich is for women who keep their Cartier watches on at the gym. Form is for sculpt-class addicts who love layered bra tops. H-O-R-S-E is for former Outdoor Voices evangelists looking to purge their closets of polyester. Literary Sport is for fans of The Row. Tracksmith is for serious runners who love vintage Ralph Lauren. Left on Friday is for minimalist moms with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy on their Pinterest boards.
And for everyone else? The budget shoppers with influencer fatigue? Now, every place from Quince and Old Navy to Costco sells decent leggings and sweatpants, and searches for “Y2K activewear” are spiking on eBay. The wellness heads have moved on from meditation and “clean” beauty to raw milk, peptide stacking, and 100 percent cotton T-shirts. A decade ago, athleisure was fashion’s bogeyman, coming to kill the art of getting dressed with its practical silhouettes and futuristic fabrics. But as Lululemon strains for a new identity and its copycat competitors jostle for clout, athleisure needs a kick in the pants. Because at this point, how many more leggings can we buy?
Inside Lululemon’s offices in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, a few blocks from where its first store opened in 2000, the company has two temperature-controlled product-testing chambers called Bert and Ernie. Here, the team runs experiments on its upcoming releases under extreme temperatures and humidity levels. “I can make it snow in here,” jokes Chantelle Murnaghan, the brand’s vice-president of research and product innovation, who is watching from a small window outside Bert. I head into a nearby changing room to try on a sample of Lululemon’s newest workout legging, called Unrestricted Power, which hits stores in February and has been in development for three years. Antonia Iamartino, the 20-year veteran of Lululemon who led the design of its blockbuster Align tights, was charged with creating a go-to for the many women embracing weight lifting and protein-maxxing. To do so, Iamartino commissioned a new type of fabric made with a very fine nylon that is both soft and compressive. In the Lululemon universe, the most important blends are proprietary and trademarked with cutesy names such as Nulu, Nulux, Everlux, Ultralu — and now, PowerLu.
Unfortunately for Lululemon, and confusingly for its customers, weeks before Unrestricted Power was set to hit stores, fans complained about a different new weight-lifting legging, made without a fancy trademarked fabric, saying it was see-through. Lululemon paused sales online, reviewed the complaints, and concluded the leggings were right and its shoppers were wrong. Specifically, customers should have bought them in a larger size than they were used to. (How were they to know?) The snafu created bad press during an already tough time for the company.
Despite its friendly Canadian personality and understated approach to advertising, Lululemon has a history of self-imposed public-relations problems. In 2013, its controversy-prone founder, Chip Wilson, went on television and blamed an unrelated see-through-pants crisis on customers’ thick thighs. “Some women’s bodies,” he lamented, “just actually don’t work for it.” The backlash was fast and passionate. Wilson, who had already stepped down as CEO, would go on to resign from the board of directors. But his comments remain part of the brand’s reputation, as does a 2004 article in which Wilson is quoted saying he chose the name Lululemon because he thought it was “funny” to hear Japanese people pronounce it. (Wilson later denied ever saying that and wrote in his memoir that he chose the name because he wanted it to sound “western” to Japanese shoppers.)
Today, Wilson is Lululemon’s most outspoken critic. In October, he took out an ad in The Wall Street Journal calling Lululemon a “sinking ship” that had “lost its edge” by “trying to appease everyone” and keep the investors happy. He wrote that Lululemon needed better leadership and more creativity. His comments found support on LinkedIn among former employees and on Reddit among customers who felt Lululemon’s quality had worsened in recent years. Two months after Wilson’s letter was published, following yet another tough earnings report, Lululemon’s CEO, Calvin McDonald, announced his resignation.
His successor had yet to be hired when I visited Vancouver in January to meet the brand’s global creative director, Jonathan Cheung, a fit 55-year-old who is about to release his first Lululemon designs this spring. “We want you to come away and go like, Oh, they’re not fucking around, are they? ” he said, leading me through a showroom of mannequins wearing spring and summer 2026 collections with his lead womenswear designer, Jo Sykes.
Cheung began his career at Moschino and Armani. Still, he doesn’t see himself as just a fashion guy. “At 5:30 a.m., I was deadlifting in that,” he says, pointing to a mannequin wearing the new weight-lifting shorts. “We talk about peptides; we talk about methylene blue.”
He spent the longest period of his career, nearly a decade, at a brand that was almost undone by the rise of athleisure: Levi’s. There, he became the head of design innovation and oversaw collaborations with Virgil Abloh and Demna as the brand successfully turned around sales by, among other strategies, making its jeans looser and more comfortable. When Cheung arrived at Lululemon at the beginning of 2024, he was puzzled to find stores selling straw hats, wool coats, and angora sweaters. The leisure part of athleisure was overshadowing the athletic apparel, and Cheung says there was an internal dialogue about whether that was a good thing.
Change doesn’t come easily at a giant public company like Lululemon, where everyone is watching the stock price. The internal politics alone take leaders at least six months to understand. Plus, it takes upwards of 18 months to get a product from design to stores. Another setback came in the form of a company tragedy: In May 2023, Cheung’s predecessor, Phil Dickinson, died of a heart attack at 55 after only nine months at the company.
Today, Lululemon’s customers are almost impossibly wide-ranging: preteens looking for Prada-esque nylon belt bags, golf dads, entry-level finance bros, and Orangetheory-addicted moms. This leaves Lululemon, and the other sportswear giants, in a tricky position. They have to compete with fast fashion without sacrificing their reputation for elite performance apparel, or they risk losing both casual customers and athletes. Nike, dealing with its own lengthy sales slump, designed a line of compressive leggings with Skims and released a new shoe full of pressure nodes that supposedly make you feel calmer. Adidas, riding high on the success of the Samba but watching the slowdown in the rest of the market, collaborated with Entire Studios, a label from Yeezy alums. Salomon, known for its fashionably ugly sneakers, just hired a creative director from Diesel and MM6 Maison Margiela.
Lululemon once had “Lab” stores in New York and Vancouver dedicated to its designer collaborations. Recently, it has focused more on mass-appeal partnerships, like a line of Mickey Mouse sweatshirts, many of which ended up on its “We Made Too Much” sale website. Cheung, who surprised customers with Erewhon-branded sweats last year, has new designer collaborations in the works. But first, he’s focused on giving the existing lineup a much-needed update. Best sellers like the men’s ABC (anti-ball-crushing) pants are no longer quite so slim cut, and women’s running shorts now feature a clever phone pocket in the lining that’s accessible from the outside. He added a version of the Fast & Free legging in leopard, the trendiest print of last year, and a men’s stretchy Metal Vent Tech top with a collar and stripe like an aughts rugby shirt.
Cheung says his vision for Lululemon started to clarify once he hired his top designers, including Sykes, a fellow Brit with a high-fashion résumé. Instead of relying solely on colors or prints to update Lululemon’s standard silhouettes, they played with textures and finishings to create laser-cut, silicon-bonded lightweight tennis skirts, running shorts, and tailored jackets with subtly playful details. In the showroom, loose-fitting palazzo pants are styled with cushioned black slip-ons that look more like The Row than Nike. No more straw hats and angora sweaters.
Their idealized female shopper — or “muse,” in Lululemon lingo — is a “mindful athlete” between 28 and 32 years old who owns a “Theragun and a Glastonbury ticket,” says Cheung. She’s playful, she’s fit, and she doesn’t live her life online. “They’re not part of that insecure Instagram culture where you’re constantly displaying yourself,” says Sykes. But if Lululemon is going to make a comeback, it will need someone to post about its clothes.
It’s another January afternoon, and I’m staring at butts. I’m on logo watch at Fuze House, an infrared-heated Pilates studio in Tribeca that’s wall-to-wall with 30 young women getting ready to sweat in pursuit of long, lean muscles. (Rumor has it Tate McRae pulsed and planked here the week before.) A couple of women are sporting Lululemon’s tiny circular symbol. But the most visible logo by far is Alo’s lowercase sans-serif name — a sure sign the brand’s popularity has already peaked. To my right is a woman in a black Splits59 set lined in soft yellow around the waistband and along the edges of her bra top. To my left, another wears a long-sleeved leotard with waist cutouts from Frankies Bikinis with loose, wide-legged drawstring pants.
“I’ve seen your TikToks. I see you’re posting about me,” says the instructor, pausing at one point near the end of class when everyone is sweating. A sign on the door leading into the studio reads NO FILMING DURING CLASS with a drawing of an iPhone inside a crossed-out circle. As people are leaving, a young woman in the front row pulls out her phone to check her hair and take a few selfies. She’s wearing a low-cut bra underneath a shrug that goes over her arms and shoulders and matching leggings. It’s all from Set Active, one of the first Instagram athleisure brands to rely on influencer gifting and limited-edition drops to get customers excited.
Everything in this studio, from the beige Bala hand weights to the organic deodorant in the locker room, is an online status symbol. Alo may have replaced Lululemon as the standard-bearer here, but new brands are already challenging its ubiquity.
“It’s what’s on trend right now, having a very clean and cohesive look,” says Payton Russell, a 26-year-old loan officer in Tampa who loves matching workout sets and is a four-times-a-week regular at Solidcore, another cool-girl fitness studio. Her favorite brands are CSB, short for Crop Shop Boutique, which is known for its dainty wrap tops, and Liaison the Label, which goes heavy on layered sports bras: “They have really unique styles — a lot of, like, plunge necklines, open backs, stuff like that.” Russell is a fan of the “clean-girl ballerina aesthetic” that I noticed at Fuze House and that dominates Skims’ latest Nike collection. She used to teach indoor-cycling classes, but now her main form of cardio is walking, so she doesn’t need her activewear to be anything fancy or technical, just cute. She hasn’t thought about Lululemon since high school. “I always do brand on brand,” she says about how she wears her 30 matching sets of bra tops and leggings. “Unless they’re from Amazon.”
Outside of Fuze House and Solidcore, however, there’s a growing fatigue with cookie-cutter “Pilates princesses,” as Kate Glavan calls them. She’s a wellness-content creator living in London who reports that Free People’s hit running shorts have made the jump from SEC campuses to London’s running scene. She thinks it’s outdated to be a “walking advertisement” in a branded set. “I’ve started wearing vintage T-shirts over a long-sleeved top I have and mixing and matching my socks,” she says. “I’m starting to see people want to have more personal style as it relates to fitness, which honestly I’m a fan of.” Even though she runs marathons and lifts weights in a gym, Glavan says she shops for style and fit more than performance. “I haven’t really found a technical aspect to be that important beyond ‘the leggings don’t fall down,’” she says. What worries her, however, is the thought of chemicals in her activewear as she starts to hear about more people ditching their spandex pants for cotton pieces from Old Navy and Target: “I’ve worn thousands of leggings on my body before. Shit, is this bad for me healthwise? ”
The answer is “maybe.” For decades, activewear was frequently treated with PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyls. These forever chemicals, common in water and food, are bad for our health and may be leaching into our skin through the fabrics. But research isn’t conclusive on its effect. Lululemon says it phased out PFAS in 2023, and Cheung is very aware that more women are stressing over microplastics and chemicals. “We’re dramatically increasing our natural-fiber content,” he says.
Thinking of the NYU girls I met at Alo Yoga, I text some of my college friends. Fifteen years ago, we were in a sorority together and regularly wore leggings and UGGs to class. Now, between the five of us, we have nine children and are still scared of being called “cheugy.” Three of them are newly obsessed with Vuori, the fast-growing California yoga brand that is especially popular in the Bay Area and among tech people. Its clothes are soft and sophisticated, more masculine than feminine, and, most important, not fitted — the opposite of the seal-sleek Lululemon look.
Maybe if I were a product manager, I would see Vuori’s appeal. But when I stopped by the Soho store across from Alo Yoga, it felt like more of the same. It even had a version of the stretchy pleated pants my mom recently bought herself from Lululemon. Aritzia has a version; so does Gap. She almost influenced me into buying a pair before I remembered just how many stretchy pants I’ve collected over the past decade: running leggings, maternity leggings, flared leggings, yoga leggings, legging joggers, thick sweatpants, thin sweatpants, ribbed-cotton house pants, silky polyester elastic-waist pants, actual silk elastic-waist pants, and knitted flares. Turns out what I really need is a great pair of jeans.
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