It's Friday Casual Every Day

Fit celebrities, the desire for a healthy lifestyle and relaxed workspaces with casual dress codes are driving the craze for a single day-to-night, work-to-play wardrobe.

- Debojyoti Ghosh and Abhik Sen

It was once one of the 10 commandments of fashion: Thou shalt not wear your exercise leggings to work. But all that changed after the cult yoga pants brand Lululemon Athletica was born around two decades ago. Chip Wilson, founder of the athletic-wear company, went to a yoga class at a Vancouver gym and was inspired to launch a yoga pants line made not of spandex but a special mix of nylon and lycra, now a trademarked fabric called luon. Lululemon then went on to reshape the entire fashion business by making athleisure—or casual clothing for both exercise and general wear—an intrinsic part of the fashion vocabulary. Today, you don’t have to go for yoga classes to wear Lululemon yoga pants. You can wear them at home, while going out to do your chores, and for casual social occasions. Heck, you can even wear them to work if you want.

Vancouver-based Lululemon was one of the first to turn yoga wear for women into mainstream fashion. Be it yoga pants, leggings, sweatpants, hoodies, tank tops or sneakers, it made athleisure fashion cool and blurred the lines between gym wear and casual clothing. Its yoga pants acquired such a cult following that customers didn’t break into a sweat paying $100 for them. “Athleisure has become a wardrobe staple the world over, whether or not one explicitly bought into the trend,” says Freya D’Souza, associate vice president, strategy, Dentsu Webchutney, a digital advertising agency. “The fact that a fashion term like ‘joggers’ has entered the average Indian fashion vocabulary is proof that athleisure has well and truly established itself in India as well.”