The new rules of wearing leggings: Why the silhouette is dividing women

Last year, a bold and potentially hurtful claim began to ricochet around the internet: Leggings were dead.

Their “reign was over,” per the Business of Fashion. Wearing them “made you look old,” declared the New York Post; specifically, they made you a boomer, according to the Wall Street Journal.

They were out as everyday pants, these pieces declared, and being rapidly eclipsed in workout settings by the ascendant “Big Workout Pant”.

Swiftly, the 30-and-up crowd rejected this decree.

“I will wear leggings till the day I die. You can try them [sic] from my cold dead hands,” one woman in Oregon responded when the Journal posted its story on Facebook.

“Nope, no, no, no! They’re never gonna go out of style. I love them!” one commenter wrote in response to a “Live With Kelly and Mark” segment in which Kelly Ripa welcomed the end of leggings. (From another commenter with a conspicuous “1968” in their username: “Good thing when you get old you don’t G.A.F.!”)

Something is happening to Americans’ relationship with our long-beloved stretchy pants.

Young women have been pivoting to baggy jeans as everyday bopping-around pants. Athleisure brands, for so long an unstoppable force in the apparel industry, are selling fewer leggings and working to diversify their offerings.

Last year, the “clean girl”-fave fitness brand Alo introduced luxury leather handbags. Lululemon now sells cardigans, blazers, maxi and midi dresses.

Outdoor Voices, a brand powered almost entirely by its colourful compressive leggings in the 2010s, introduced only one new leggings style when its founder, Ty Haney, returned to the role of CEO last year: a pair of plain black capris, styled on its model with yellow kitten heels.

And today, Haney told The Washington Post, its best-selling bottoms are its RecTrek styles — made of a 90-10 nylon-elastane blend with a roomy hiking- or cargo-pant silhouette.

Yet, at the fanciest gyms in the trendiest parts of Manhattan, leggings are still, overwhelmingly, the default uniform for women.

Sure, you may see a baggier look here, a few pairs of bike shorts there. But in fashionable SoHo, the youthful West Village and the 20-something-professional enclave of Flatiron, matching sets consisting of a tiny top and leggings still rule (yes, I worked out in all these places to bring you this dogged, shoe-leather reporting).

And for such a supposedly dead style, leggings have been making an awful lot of appearances in street style photos from Paris Fashion Week.

Reports of leggings’ relegation to the fashion trash heap have been greatly exaggerated; the rules of wearing them have simply changed. Here’s how to navigate the new world order.

Leggings are fair game at the gym (and on the way to and from)

Nicole Radon Humphrey, 33, is a long-time New York City fitness instructor who moved upstate and opened a studio in Buffalo a few months ago.

In both locations, she reports, women have been attending her strength-training, sculpt and Pilates classes almost entirely in calf-hugging, 7/8-length leggings, many of them from Set Active, Vuori and 437 and paired with matching sports bras.

“All the girls love a matching set,” Humphrey says.

“It’s just easy — no frills, nothing gets in the way.”

Where you might see fewer pairs of leggings, however, are grocery stores, restaurants, bars and workplaces.

“They’re no longer the dominant pant,” says Deirdre Clemente, a history professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and the author of Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style.

In the 2010s and during the COVID pandemic, she remembers, leggings just “blocked everything else out”.

That wasn’t the first time leggings had elbowed everything else out of the way, and this isn’t the first time they’ve retreated: The beatnik, dance-inspired looks of the 1960s often incorporated black leggings, Clemente says.

And leggings and leg warmers were the iconic look of the similarly dance-adjacent exercise craze of the 1980s.

But “no pant can ever sustain being the only thing for anything more than seven to 10 years,” she says.

“People are looking for different silhouettes that they can play with.”

If you’re wearing them anywhere else, dress up

Catherine Michelle, the 31-year-old founder of a social media management company, divides her time between New York City and London.

Lately, she has noticed that the urban dwellers around her are wearing their stretchy bottoms more choosily — and formally.

In London, Michelle tends to style her leggings with tall boots or a blazer.

“Leggings aren’t out, lazy styling is out,” she reasons.

“We stopped wearing leggings everywhere, but we didn’t stop wearing them.”

Haney, the Outdoor Voices founder, agrees. Young people are spending a lot more time at the gym, she says.

“I’m seeing a little less, like, baking activity into the everyday and a little more intention. Like, ‘I go to the gym to work out, and then I’m out and back to my life,’” she says.

“Which is a little bit the reverse of what I saw originally when starting Outdoor Voices.”

Joye Wingard, a 20-year-old sophomore studying psychology at Harvard, frequently wears leggings to exercise and big, cozy sweaters to class.

She cannot imagine, however, cavorting around Cambridge in both at the same time, she tells me (and I, 36 and a veteran of a time when that very combo was ubiquitous among trendy young women, briefly thousand-yard-stare into the abyss of middle age).

“Those are just,” she says, “two different vibes.”

… Or wear a flared silhouette

While the deeply “millennial core” skinny legging looks passé to some these days, its earlier ancestor - the bell-bottom yoga pant, of Y2k-era fame - has lately enjoyed a slightly better reputation as casual wear.

That said, Humphrey and Michelle note that there’s a reason flares are more popular as a casual wear look than as workout gear. At a Reformer Pilates class, Michelle muses, “What, is it going to get caught in the springs?” Wear these out and about instead (but this time around, they go over your Uggs).

Stirrups are back in play for 2026

Even if leggings really were over last year, the over-ness is now also over: A small, youthful TikTok movement has materialised to “bring back leggings in 2026”.

Somewhat surprisingly, the 2026 leggings revival resurrects the equestrian-inspired stirrup style, a 1980s classic.

“Oh my God,” says Clemente, a parent of three teenagers, when I inform her.

“I had a pair of those in seventh grade.”

It’s true, though. Stylish women in North America and across Europe have been pairing black stirrup leggings sockless with their loafers, ballet flats and heels.

H&M and Gap are selling the silhouette for spring.

“It’s elongating the leg by bringing the bottom of the pant down as far as you can get. Which just gives it something new, a new element,” Clemente says. “I love it. Maybe that’s the next reinvention.”

They can be pants. They’re still not tights.

Let’s leave this style behind and never look back.