Sportswear serves to Allerest two things: They shall, if possible promote athletic performance and protect the body from injury. As the exhibition Sporting Life at FIT shows, clothing that is designed for sports activities, but also often influenced the fashion world and vice versa.
The exhibition Sporting Life shows more than 100 garments and accessories from the collection of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, and takes a look at the history of “sportswear” and how changed structures and materials in the course of the last 150 years silhouettes.
Since women in the 19th Century began to publicly actively to engage in sports, sportswear and fashion were mixed. Dorothy Levitt, the first woman who took part in a motor race stressed in 1909 that both pretty appearance and comfort are extremely important in an open carriage. Designers of the 1920s such as Coco Chanel, Jane Regny and Jean Patou blended the lines between sportswear and fashion with dresses reminiscent of tennis.
The Paris correspondent of the New Yorker, Elizabeth Hawes, wrote in 1927 that fashion is quite fit for sports. For all afternoon activities such as golf, they wrote that one should just wear a lunch costume. Especially in the 1980s were clothes that were meant for training, popular out of the gym-an example of stylish combination of fashion and sports tracksuits Norma Kamali.
The list of designers whose fashion was inspired by sports is long and the FIT for example, shows Swimwear by Christian Lacroix and Azzedine Alaïa, a sailing outfit by Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé, a coat dress by Issey Miyake, reminiscent equal in various sports such as baseball, football or hunting, high heels tennis shoes by Jean Paul Gaultier or a coat dress by Yohji Yamamoto that reflects his interest in historical fashion, because it is reminiscent of Victorian rider clothing.