At this time when we are forced to stay at home, the concept of comfort has acquired a much more significant value.
No longer having the need to dress in a certain way, to go to work or to go out to dinner, for an aperitif, etc., our style has become comfy by necessity. And if there is an item of clothing that responds to this need, now daily, is undoubtedly the tracksuit.
So we decided to take a little trip into the history and the culture of the tracksuit.
It’s not easy to say when sportswear as a whole was “invented”, but we’re pretty sure that it all started in the early 1900s thanks mainly to two companies, Le Coq Sportif in France and Russell Athletic in the United States.
In 1882, Émile Camuset began producing stockings in Romilly-sur-Seine, a town of 14,000 inhabitants in the department of Aube in the Grand Est region of France.
From 1920 onwards, under the encouragement of his daughter Mireille, the family business added sportswear to the items that were already part of the production, namely a grey jersey sweat-absorbing jumpsuit (sweatpants). Le Coq Sportif came up with this solution because it had become necessary for athletes to have comfortable and breathable clothing, since the wool, used until then, did not meet the demands for comfort and freshness that those who practiced sport were looking for.
From the beginning of the 1930s, it became one of the official suppliers of the French football, basketball, rugby and athletics federations.
Around the same time (1902), in Alexander City, Alabama in the United States, Bernie Russell founded Russell Manufacturing Co., which in 1910 established itself as an established company in the production of women’s underwear and children’s underwear. In 1920, he created the first breathable, sweat-absorbing cotton sweatshirt, which we still know today as a sweatshirt, and in 1936, he acquired Southern Manufacturing Company, which gave him access to the supply for athletics teams and changed its name to Russell Southern. Later, in 1938, the company’s “athletics” division, Russell Athletic, was formed and began manufacturing clothing (sweatpants, sweatshirts and jackets) for basketball, baseball and football.
In the 19th century, the concept of comfort in the sport took hold globally, events such as the Olympic Games, for example, as well as the FIFA World Cup, pushed “modern” sportswear onto an international stage, making it a standard of physical activity, compared to tight-fitting woolly trousers and jerseys, which were the norm until a few years before.
The tracksuit remained relegated to gyms and training camps until the ’70s, then, thanks to a new passion for fitness, and thanks to pop culture with movies like Rocky, for example, paved the way for the tracksuit that exploded, in the true sense of the word and in terms of popularity, in the ’80s thanks to the Hip-Hop culture.
The Run DMC for example, made the tracksuit adidas three stripes a real uniform, making its popularity skyrocket and giving it a halo of street credibility that made it an icon of urban culture and a real status symbol in other subcultures around the world, such as chav, casual and cyber.
The enormous success of rap music over the next two decades, and consequently of music videos, gave even more breadth to the diffusion of the tracksuit even in leisure time; in short, the tracksuit became an integral and fundamental part of everyone’s wardrobe.
Today, the tracksuit is our faithful companion of the days spent at home, often doing nothing, and precisely, for this reason, we conclude this small historical and cultural journey of the tracksuit, with a phrase extracted from a meme on the subject as current as ever: “created for exercise, used for the exact opposite“.
