Athleisure may be over, but let’s stop telling young girls what they can and can’t wear

Yoga pants didn’t exist when I started doing yoga. We had only pants. You could do yoga in them.

They were typically pajama-like in nature, loose-fitting, sometimes billowy. They ran the gamut from genuine sweat pants, likely cast off from your high school or college days, to hippie palazzos, which conjured an image that you’d recently returned from an ashram in India and these pants demonstrated your newly minted yoga street cred.

Modern yoga in its early stages was many things: spiritual, mysterious, calming, and kooky, to name a few. But, stylish? No. Not even close. Our style was an affront to the trends of the time: clogs or Birkenstocks for most. Unshaven armpits on some.

Yoga today isn’t just stylish, but influential to the rest of fashion and culture, having once sparked the phenomenon of “athleisure.” That trend got a lot of mileage, eventually caused some fashion fatigue, and still manages to cause a national stir. In the last few weeks alone, we’ve had at least two kerfuffles.

This week a high school in Houston implemented a dress code for parents that involved, in part, a ban on leggings and other ultra-casual clothing. Parents, the school noted, need to set an example for their children. Prior to that, a mother of four sons wrote a plea to the University of Notre Dame newspaper asking female students to stop wearing yoga pants. As in, she wanted half the student body to alter its sartorial choices to better accommodate her sensibilities and stave off the distraction these pants might cause her sons, as well as men everywhere. She presented her attempt at control under the guise of concern and protection for the young women she addressed.

The response? Students protested by wearing more yoga pants, which seems hard to do on a college campus.

Blue jeans may have once been our national identity, but after yoga pants strutted onto the scene, denim represented too much effort. For years, denim sales dropped precipitously. Only within the past couple years has denim begun to heat up again.

My personal gripe with yoga pants falls within the realm of fatigue. I wear them so much due to my profession that whenever I don’t have to wear them, I’m thrilled. The novelty is gone for me, the grass greener when I can wear smart pants with zippers and buttons and those that possibly require a few passes of an iron.

But when it comes to the backlash directed toward girls and young women wearing athleisure to school and elsewhere — because yoga pants are this generation’s version of tight jeans or ripped jeans or whatever denim trend dominated your youth — I return to the camp of being pro-pant.

To ask girls to dress differently to shelter boys seems, at best, like parental overreach. At worst, it tills fertile ground for toxic masculinity to flourish. It’s telling young girls that women can and should be held responsible for the shortcomings or bad behavior of boys and, eventually, men.

This is not to say I disagree with dress codes. I actually think they can be wonderful, from setting a tone of respect in the classroom — which might later influence workplace habits — to decreasing the influence of peer pressure, to reducing the time and costs associated with dressing young people, which is especially important for low-income households and school districts.

There’s one catch though: Dress codes should be drafted and applied equally. If yoga pants are banned, are other forms of athletic wear also banned, such as sweat pants and sports jerseys? If long hairstyles like dreadlocks are prohibited, as they were earlier this year in the case of a New Jersey high school wrestler, then how about floppy bro cuts?

You may blame yoga pants for lots of things: the tamping down of high fashion in favor of athleisure, the often exorbitant price of clothes we wear for sweating (or sitting on the couch watching “The Great British Baking Show”), and the uniformity that a trend of this scale creates.

But the impure thoughts or actions of young men when faced with the injustice of their peers wearing them? That’s not a burden I think leggings — or the girls wearing them — should shoulder.

The advent of yoga pants made yoga more comfortable, through the innovation of technical fabrics along with their streamlined fit. Athleisure made it acceptable to wear these comfortable leggings in settings having nothing to do with yoga or fitness. All of which is a good thing. Power to the pants and the women who wear them.

And we can stop wearing them whenever we like, too. Many women already have. We can do this because we miss trousers or natural fabrics or having a wardrobe that serves different purposes based upon location and activity. But stop wearing them for the coddling of young men and appeasement of their mothers?

That’s just backward thinking: one more tired, patriarchal belief that needs to go out of style once and for all.