Sporty style is poised to completely take over the summer, with the Olympics happening in Paris following a couple of incredibly athletically minded seasons on the runways. It started over in England, where football (or soccer, as we call it on this side of the pond) is king and Grace Wales Bonner and Martine Rose released collaborations with Adidas and Nike, respectively. Here in New York, Bode’s Emily Adams Bode Aujla recently launched Bode Recreation, a sub-label focused on activewear, and christened it with a Nike collaboration featuring both sneakers and ready-to-wear.
Add to that the current WNBA fever that’s sweeping the nation, and, well, it’s simply never been a better time to indulge your sporty sensibilities. In thinking about all the sporty trends that have taken over the industry, I kept coming back to one woman: the inimitable Melanie Chisholm, known to you, me, and the rest of the world as Melanie C , a.k.
a. Sporty Spice, the undisputed cultural mother of our athletic-fashion era. Almost 30 years later, her uniform of tracksuits, crop tops, and Nike Air Max sneakers is looking exactly right.
“What is so fun is that I see kids, I see grown-ups, I see all these different generations wearing these sporty clothes and I do think, Well, I had a hand in that,” Chisholm tells me over Zoom, fresh off a tour that just wrapped in Australia. “Now I wish I’d kept more of those clothes, but the things I’ve kept I still re-wear, and I’ve found myself even re.
