Dress Codes is a new set that examines how the laws of clothing have impacted different cultural contexts, as well as your drawer. It examines clothing through the years.
Women’s t-shirts and extensive shorts, occasionally cinched with a belt, were worn when they first entered the 1928 Olympic track and field competitions. Those breezy, decidedly non-aerodynamic silhouettes wouldn’t fly today (quite literally ) as contemporary female sprinters, hurdlers and long-jumpers don tight performance spandex and high-cut briefs that purport to reduce drag and lessen chafing.
But how great should you reduce, exactly? One image of two dolls side by side at a party event this history April, which was a hot topic, and it became a hot topic at the same time. On the left, the men’s dress featured a pond and mid-length shorts combination, on the right, a women’s leotard seemed to fall to unsafe heights, with a small crotch and the mannequin’s plastic pelvic bones obvious.
Former US track and field athlete Lauren Fleshman responded in an article citing “patriarchal forces” as the cause of the women’s set design, saying that “professional athletes should be able to thrive without dedicating mental space to regular pube vigilance or the mental gymnastics of having every prone piece of your body on display.”
Other sportsmen chimed in, including pole vaulter Katie Moon, who posted a photo of herself in the system on and wrote that she thought the doll was more a problem than her.
Nike made a statement to CNN in April that the police was only one of the collection’s fifty parts, and runner Sha’ Carri Richardson had actually modeled a singlet with shorts at the celebration. Customization would be available as needed. A representative from USA Track and Field ( USATF ) acknowledged that the collection’s press release described a process of consulting athletes to meet their needs.
Some might be keeping an eye out for the controversial pieces as weekend athletes compete. The discussion follows a headline-making rally at the 2020 Tokyo Games, when the German children’s gymnastics group bikini-cut unitards in favor of wider protection, in a statement against “gender in acrobatics,” the German Gymnastics Federation said at the moment.
Function and fashion
There aren’t many rules for what athletes can wear on the Olympic track. Their shoes can’t provide an unfair advantage — meaning brands can’t go full in their designs— and their clothes must be “clean and designed and worn so as not to be objectionable” as well as “non-transparent”, according to World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field. (Athletes can even run barefoot, as did the 1960-victory Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila).
Long before the clothing market transformed fabrics for high-caliber performance, men who initially competed in contemporary track and field events in 1896 wore long, high-waisted shorts and tank tops with smooth loafers.
Dobriana Gheneva, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and an apparel designer for Nike, The North Face, and Reebok, said, “Athletes didn’t use to wear athletic clothing. The clothes were quite elegant. Over the decades, the apparel became more and more technical… and sometimes that means adding fabric, sometimes that means eliminating fabric, for comfort and ease of movement.”
Once they were permitted to compete in the Olympics, female Olympians wore straightforward t-shirts and shorts on the track for decades, but in the 1960s, the hemlines became more and more tight and the hemlines became higher and tighter. In the 1980s, brief and bikini styles were popularized, and today, tight-fitting shorts, tights, singlets, leotards, vests, t-shirts, crop tops and briefs in sweat-wicking and breathable performance fabrics all promise little drag — and the accentuation of runners’ muscular builds.
“If you look good, you have confidence and it probably does help you quite a bit with the performance”, Gheneva said.
That’s a sentiment that became apparent through the iconic fashion and nails of the fastest woman in the world, Florence Griffith Joyner, and her successors today, including Richardson, who is making her first Olympic appearance.
“We glam up, like we put it on, we step forward, we’re ready no matter what. Look good, feel good, do good. That all relates to the mental aspect, the emotional aspect, and ultimately the physical”, she told for her cover story in July.
The red and white hooded, belted, high-cut leotard worn by Griffith Joyner to win numerous gold medals in 1988, as well as the one-legged catsuit Serena Williams later wore on the tennis court, are some of her most well-known looks. Australian runner Cathy Freeman also took note of Flo-Jo’s style in 2000 when she received a full-coverage, hooded Nike Swift Suit, which was said to reduce her drag by 5 to 10 %, possibly as a result of her triumphant 400-meter victory.
“It was one of the first, if not the first, garments that was tested in a wind tunnel”, Gheneva said.
But more fabric hasn’t caught on since then for women track athletes, instead, the reverse has trended. The differences between men’s kits are obvious, even though high cuts can give athletes who are at their best physical form a leggy boost in confidence. Although Gheneva acknowledges that athletes should be able to choose what is most comfortable, skin-baring designs can walk a “fine line” between what she means to do.
Why are female uniforms required to be more revealing than male uniforms? she asked. At this point, “We should be going beyond that.”