FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

FASHION ISSUE EXTRA - WORKING IT OUT

I went to the gym yesterday and realized that sportswear is to style what landmines are to hopscotch--and no amount of Wu Wear will persuade me otherwise. Like so many women I am no more likely to throw on a track suit than anarchists are likely to crush the city of London, and so, for us, a new gymwear is born: a kind of nightwear-lingerie-dancing-builder combo that makes us all look like we're being taken out for a walk from our day centers every time we hit the gym.

Advertisement

My sportswear phobia all stems from a childhood being tortured by lesbians in thick tennis socks who cattle-prodded me into doing humiliating things with medicine balls and something called a "vault horse" during those neverending P.E. classes. It's no wonder so many of us developed magical bi-weekly periods, twisted ligaments and slipped discs--it was a choice of sitting on the bench or getting our delicate teenage pride worked over with a bleep test in front of crowd of braying bitches.

The early tears I shed in shapeless leggings, graying t-shirts and Hi-Tecs (my parents refused to buy Nike) encouraged me to hide in hessian sacks for years. So as soon as I became old enough to respond to vicious humiliation with injunctions, I decided that never again would I don a single piece of sportswear.

This was fine until I had to admit that I was smoking, drinking, and sitting my way into death. Without exercise to combat my lifestyle, I was probably going to die at 26 while sitting on the toilet, eating a burger, without even a hit single to my name. Thusly, like so many before me, I joined a gym.

And like so many before me I still refused to wear so much as an Adidas t-shirt. My generation of fat hipsters and I, by a monumental effort of will over sanity, have convinced ourselves that if we just wear pyjama bottoms, an old t-shirt our dads got free from the builder's merchants, and some Pumps, nobody at the gym will know the difference between us and the Fabio at the neighboring treadmill. There are hundreds of us out there. Hundreds of people too traumatized or too vain to wear a track suit or other suitable gym wear.

I have seen women in tights, women in those monkey-faced Paul Frank pyjama bottoms (because, you know, no one knows they're nightwear), women in swimsuits (well, without a sports bra you've got to strap them down with something), and most brilliantly of all, a woman in an all-in-one that was most definitely intended as underwear--all sweating away like this is the most normal gym get-up in the world.

NELL FRIZZELL

(illustration by Narcsville)