Always keen to grab a bag, the last few years have seen high-end fashion brands reach for their slice of the sweatsuit pie. As a result, “tracksuits are worn even by young people from suburbia whose experiences differ substantially from the inner-city mania that led to the genre’s inception,” Addo explains.Įighty-two years since the advent of Le Coq Sportif’s “Sunday Suit”, tracksuits have become the norm across class, age, race and gender. But despite British society’s resistance to the genre, grime prevailed and spread into all corners of the UK. Once again, the garment fell victim to extreme politicisation and was often associated with violence and crime. Writer and social commentator Franklyn Addo explains the tracksuit became “a symbol of rebellion for young people like myself growing up in London”. Later that decade he wore a distinctive yellow one-piece tracksuit lined with black stripes in the film Game of Death, which not only went on to become Lee’s trademark but also inspired Uma Thurman’s yellow number in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and, presumably, countless Halloween costumes.
#LE COQ SPORTIF TRACKSUIT TV#
In the 70s, Bruce Lee donned a red two-piece tracksuit on TV show Longstreet – the first time the style showed up on primetime US television.
Like Beckenbaur’s Adidas collaboration, part of the intrigue of the tracksuit as a cultural phenomenon are its many phases and faces. The first tracksuit endorsement of its kind it’s one the most iconic bits of sportswear ever created and remains worn today by everyone from rockstars to Jonah Hill and Erasmus students. If you don’t recognise the name, you’ll recognise the look: three iconic white stripes on tracksuit material. The tracksuit’s big break however came in the late 60s when a little company called Adidas created their first piece of apparel – a tracksuit released in collaboration with German football star Franz Beckenbaur. The invention of the tracksuit is understood to have happened in 1939 when French sports company Le Coq Sportif created what was then called “the Sunday suit”. “Its casualness and flexibility snubs the formality and the rules of mainstream masculinity.”
“ is a great example of anti-establishment clothing,” says Dr Joanna Turney, Design Historian and associate professor of Fashion at Winchester School of Art. But 80 or so years after its invention, the tracksuit’s tale has become rooted in subcultures, resistance, re-appropriation and a whole lot of string. Casually known as “trackies” in the UK, the tracksuit’s creation in the late 1930s was rooted in practicality, made to keep the body warm before and after physical activity. So how did the tracksuit become the fashion staple we know it to be today?įirst, some facts: The tracksuit (or the sweatsuit) is – officially – a loose-fitting set of garments consisting of a sweatshirt or hoodie and bottoms with an elasticated or drawstring waist. In October, fast fashion giant ASOS even declared that the fashion industry was suffering from a shortage of sportswear due to the rise in demand.
None of us could have predicted that the next chapter in the tracksuit biography would be due to a panoramic, but – in the same way companies reported a surge in demand for hand sanitizer – companies began telling the world how many tracksuits they were selling.īy April 2020, marketing firm Edited announced that sales of tracksuits had increased by 36 percent compared to the same period in 2019.
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