The Reign of Leggings Is Over. What’s Next?

Purba Tyagi is a yoga teacher based in New York City. For the past year, she has not worn a single pair of leggings to class.

Instead, Tyagi, 30, is finding her balance on the mat in various wider pants designed for casual wear, such as Paloma Wool’s stretchy jersey-knit pants and Deiji Studio’s linen trousers that can almost double as pyjamas.

“I sleep in them, wake up in them, teach in them and go out to a bar in them,” she said. “With leggings, it’s like I’m going to give myself a yeast infection after six hours of classes.”

Tyagi is among a growing cohort of women ditching their leggings for looser fits, some after years of donning the spandex silhouette for every occasion from Pilates and errands to air travel and brunch. After a surge in growth in the activewear following the pandemic, Google searches for leggings have consistently fallen since December 2020, when the term peaked.

Retailers too have pulled back from the style. As of the first quarter of 2025, leggings accounted for 39 percent of bottoms assortments across activewear brands, according to retail intelligence firm Edited — that’s down from 47 percent in 2022.

Lululemon, long regarded as the holy grail of leggings, may be hit particularly hard. The brand’s shares fell 20 percent last month after it slashed its full-year guidance and posted a slight dip in comparable sales in its Americas market (total sales still increased by 7 percent). Lululemon leggings were also dethroned by Ugg as the leading fashion trend for girls in Piper Sandler’s bi-annual survey of American teens, after a seven-year run at the top. Lululemon did not respond to requests for comment.

“A legging is an item where there could be only so much innovation,” said Kendall Becker, a Pilates instructor and the fashion and beauty director at Trendalytics. “We see this with any trend burnout: For a moment in time, we’re so fascinated with that item and the consumer ends up with 20 pairs in her closet. And then she’s sick of it.”

The slow fade of leggings from their once-dominant perch in the athleisure hierarchy is in no small part driven by a generational divide. While Millennials helped crown leggings as the ultimate do-everything uniform, Gen Z is shifting the silhouette entirely, gravitating toward oversized, slouchier workout clothes: baggy parachute pants, boxy tees, track shorts and sweats with the waist rolled down. For these younger consumers, comfort isn’t about stretch — it’s about ease, looseness and a kind of anti-polished attitude that reverses the decade-long supremacy of immaculately matching colour-blocked sets, iconically popularised by Outdoor Voices circa 2014.

Most activewear brands have started to adapt their assortment to meet the rising demand of looser silhouettes among younger consumers. Nike has expanded its offering of wide-leg and flared styles, including its trouser-like PerfectStretch pants and a bell-bottom version of its popular Zenvy line. Even Lululemon reduced its assortment by 22 percent in the last three years, Edited found.

But there are signs of a wider activewear slowdown. The category of active bottoms has seen a 12 percent dip in sales between April 2024 and 2025, according to Kristen Classi-Zummo, director and apparel analyst for market research firm Circana.

“We’ve seen this very heavy activewear influence that accelerated during Covid slow down a little bit, and while comfort remains critical, the [activewear] trend has shifted,” she said.

Deb Ko, a 32-year-old grad student, said she was part of the wave of consumers who drove the spike in growth of activewear in the years following the pandemic. “I gained weight during Covid and I was trying to feel all sexy and girlboss,” Ko said.

Ko added that while she still sometimes wears leggings to the gym, she’s done shelling out for shiny new exercise outfits.

“We should all be sweating in our free-ass T-shirts that we got in college,” she said. “You’re supposed to look bummy when you work out.”

Big Pant Energy

For years, the top-selling bottoms style at Free People Movement was leggings, according to Courtney Weis, managing director of brand marketing for the activewear line owned by Urban Outfitters, Inc. FP Movement offers a more fashion-forward selection compared to many of its activewear competitors, and it has been outperforming the sector overall in recent quarters. In the three months ending April 30, the brand saw total sales spike by 29 percent.

Since last year, sales volume on leggings has declined, Weis said. And as of summer 2025, the bestselling “Never Better” leggings has been officially unseated by a flowy cropped track pant called the Champ Is Here.

Overall, FP Movement has seen a surge of interest in new bottoms styles, fuelled by consumer interest in outdoor sports such as hiking and running. Last month, the brand launched its first-ever bottoms-only marketing campaign, following the Gen Z-favoured styling rule of pairing tight tops with loose bottoms or vice versa.

“The reason we decided to focus on a bottoms campaign is just to showcase the diversity of what we offer but also our customer is gravitating to wider silhouettes, capris and flares,” Weis said. “The most-viewed product page this past week was our balloon style harem pants, the Momentum pants. Right now it says 10,000 people are viewing it online.”

Just like how straight- and wide-leg jeans overtook skinny jeans in dominance, the same shapes have now arrived to challenge the legging. But so far, between track pants and flared yoga pants, there has not been a singular style to replace leggings as the everyday essential. Trendalytics’ Becker said she has seen a lot more shorts in her Pilates classes. As for her own teaching attire, recently she has favoured donning track pants over shorts with a layered look that allows her to go from meetings with clients to class seamlessly.

Among shoppers like Tyagi and Ko, there’s also growing awareness of the potential harms of the microplastics in activewear. A 2023 study published by the American Chemical Society found that microplastics — particularly a class of compounds known as brominated flame retardants, which have been linked to thyroid disorders and other health problems — are drawn out of synthetic materials and into the body when they come into contact with sweat.

Outside the Gym

Well before leggings began to lose their cool in the gym, they lost their status as an everyday essential — at least among the fashion elite.

Whereas leggings used to be the unofficial uniform of moms dropping off their kids at school, for instance, the new look is a simple cotton pant with either an elastic or drawstring waistband and wide hems. It’s a generic style that can be found in practically any store today, from Loro Piana to Old Navy. But a handful of indie labels, including Deiji Studio, have come to define this look of the moment, and chief among them is Donni, a brand so synonymous with the moms-at-preschool circuit that writer Maura Brannigan penned an entire article for The Cut about the phenomenon.

“People are wearing them exactly the same way they would wear leggings, whether it’s with an oversized sweater or button-down shirt,” said Donni founder Alyssa Wasko of one of her bestsellers, the Rib Kick Flare pant.

Wasko added she never set out to replace leggings as a wardrobe staple. “It’s kind of like a happy accident and it’s been a really interesting place to fall,” she told The Business of Fashion. The pants began to take off in 2023 and Donni’s e-commerce sales tripled last year, Wasko added.

Another label at the forefront of the trend is Leset, which launched in 2019 with the very mission to combine comfort with elevated fabrics and silhouettes, according to founder Lili Chemla. Leset sales grew nearly 200 percent in 2024, she said. Its current bestseller is the Kyoto Carpenter Pant, a baggy drawstring trouser in poplin cotton.

“Leggings were the uniform for so long that they started to feel uninspired,” Chemla said. “Women still want to feel as comfortable as they are in a legging, but more polished.”

For now, few have abandoned the legging altogether. FP Movement still sells hordes of its buttery soft leggings, and leggings still account for nearly half of Lululemon’s bottoms assortment, according to Edited.

Leset, meanwhile, will continue to stock its signature stirrup legging in future collections, Chemli added. “I personally still wear leggings to Pilates,” she said.