There are a lot of things that Ozempic & Co. have killed business for. Weight Watchers. Diets from cabbage soup to the boiled egg. Fat-but-jolly female film stars. The latest victim is the Lycra Company, which has filed for bankruptcy after sinking into a whopping $1.2 billion (£897 billion) of debt. That’s a lot of leotards!
Invented in 1958 by the gloriously named Joseph Shivers, a chemist working for DuPont, Lycra is an elastic fibre intended as a replacement for rubber – which can get rather clammy – in clothing. But it didn’t come into its own until the go-getting 1980s, when the craze for ‘aerobics’ – ‘Feel the burn!’ – led by a ‘resting’ Jane Fonda, inspired a million women to don Lycra and leg warmers and make fools of themselves to her hectoring ‘work-out’ videos.
This was the era of the films Fame and Flashdance and the whole dancewear-as-streetwear trend. On lithe youngsters, Lycra looked lovely, and the streamlined workwear aspect spoke of a busy and vital life, a vision of femininity which was equally at home prancing around in front of mirrors or holding one’s own in a steelworks. On older and broader broads – many of whom continue to choose ‘leggings’ to this day – it could be a trifle unforgiving. They could even make one look a bit like a trifle that forgot to say ‘When!’. Briefly, I was one of those chubsters. A certain type of man – aggressive cyclists, often known as ‘Lycra Louts’ – would earn the material an even worse reputation than fat birds.
Today we are in hard times, and a pair of leg warmers won’t keep out the cold
Olivia Newton-John in her Physical music video was a gorgeous musical example of Lycra-chic. In the 1985 film Perfect, the entire cast seems to spend all their time in Lycra. John Travolta played a devious undercover Rolling Stone reporter who goes after a story suggesting that fitness clubs are glorified pick-up joints, incurring the attraction and wrath of Jamie Lee Curtis, who appears to have a Magimix stuffed down her leotard. The Washington Post decreed it ‘a trashy movie about women jumping up and down in leotards’ that ‘touts the First Amendment like a corny romance from the ’40s – stars and stripes in spandex’.
But Lycra didn’t have to be trashy. In 1985, the distinctly upmarket if low-key designer Donna Karan launched her ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ collection. It featured a Lycra bodysuit as the foundation of ‘the modern working woman’s wardrobe’, intended to take a woman from boardroom to bar, office to off-licence, without a lot of fuss and planning. It sounds like common sense, but to a generation of women who believed that they had to get gussied up in order to be taken seriously (think of Mrs Thatcher’s helmet of hair and pussy-cat bow blouses), it was quite the relief.
The prized mode of sexuality at the time was that of a woman in control at work and at play. These were Madonna’s great years, and she herself was no stranger to the stretchy stuff.
Today we are in hard times, though, and a pair of leg warmers won’t keep out the cold. As the Times wittily put it, ‘Lycra has been stretched thin for years since a 2019 acquisition by the Chinese textile company Ruyi Textile and Fashion International Group Limited.’ According to its bankruptcy filing, the company suffered from decreased demand, struggled to fend off lower-priced competitors, and was damaged by Donald Trump’s unpredictable tariffs and legal disputes with its former Chinese owners.
It’s daft to get apocalyptic about these little cultural glitches, but the fall of Lycra does seem like yet another tiny Lego brick in the wall of us in the West going to hell in a handcart. It fits in neatly alongside the creepy rise of ‘modesty dressing’ and the endless conquering of American manufacturing by the Chinese.
The last great cultural celebration of Lycra was probably in 2004, in the video for the hit record Call On Me, a dance number by the Swedish DJ Eric Prydz, which was so overtly sexy that Tony Blair said of it, ‘The first time it came on, I nearly fell off my rowing machine.’
Of course, people still wear ‘athleisure’ clothes, particularly Queen Bee mothers wanting to look busy and fit – in both senses of the word – on the school run. But now that the semaglutide weight jab is king, the desire to look as though one spends an indecent amount of time leaping about like a crazy thing has lost its lustre. ‘I have a fast metabolism!’ is the modern explanation for keeping one’s girlish figure into middle age, when everyone knows you’re banging up the Zempy like there’s no tomorrow.
Still, it’s bittersweet to remember a time when young, urban, liberal, Western women were harmlessly narcissistic rather than suicidally empathetic. Back when their only crime was loving themselves a little too much in their second-skin Lycra rather than hijabing up and wishing for the destruction of their own civilisation.
