Mick Hartley

Julie Burchill in the Spectator mourns the bittersweet death of Lycra, as the company files for bankruptcy:

It’s daft to get apocalyptic about these little cultural glitches, but the fall of Lycra does seem like yet another tiny Lego brick in the wall of us in the West going to hell in a handcart. It fits in neatly alongside the creepy rise of ‘modesty dressing’ and the endless conquering of American manufacturing by the Chinese.…

Of course, people still wear ‘athleisure’ clothes, particularly Queen Bee mothers wanting to look busy and fit – in both senses of the word – on the school run. But now that the semaglutide weight jab is king, the desire to look as though one spends an indecent amount of time leaping about like a crazy thing has lost its lustre. ‘I have a fast metabolism!’ is the modern explanation for keeping one’s girlish figure into middle age, when everyone knows you’re banging up the Zempy like there’s no tomorrow.

Still, it’s bittersweet to remember a time when young, urban, liberal, Western women were harmlessly narcissistic rather than suicidally empathetic. Back when their only crime was loving themselves a little too much in their second-skin Lycra rather than hijabing up and wishing for the destruction of their own civilisation.