Ralph Lauren has seen the future and it is sports. And he’s not alone. On runways from Milan to New York, designers as diverse as Rifat Ozbek, Anna Sui, Isaac Mizrahi, and Yves Saint Laurent have poached the graphic stripes of streetwise Adidas sweats and splashed them onto everything from tiny tops to sexy knit dresses.
There wasn’t a collection for spring ’94 that didn’t have at least one flirty tennis skirt, gym-worthy T-shirt, or pair of waffle-soled sneakers. Karl Lagerfeld even sent a pair of beige-and-black Rollerblades careering down the Chanel runway while muttering something about how despite a season of soft silhouettes, “the body cannot be ignored.” Still harder to ignore are the athletic artery of bladers flowing through New York’s Central Park and the stampede of “street hikers” (as L.
A. Gear executives affectionately call their sneaker-obsessed customers) pounding pavements, tennis courts, and basketball courts all over the world in a veritable melting pot of athletic gear—from dirty canvas Converse high-tops, high-tech Air Huaraches, and preppy Stan Smiths to boldly colored hockey jerseys, logo-festooned T-shirts, and striped track pants. These are people who, as Lauren would say, “are partaking of life,” but downtown in New York’s SoHo, armies of dead-serious fashion groupies are stomping around in Adidas Gazelles and turquoise blue Puma Suedes.
(Just to jog the memory, those are the models that were very popular before sneakers beca.
