ReportageHow can you think of taking care of your body by practicing yoga while wearing synthetic outfits? A small team of students from the Institut français de la mode has taken up the challenge of marketing fitness clothing without petroleum-derived materials before the end of the year.
When you type “leggings” in the specialized search engine Tagwalk, it brings up 206 photos of fashion shows showing models, women or men, who wear one. From Celine to Saint Laurent, from Balmain to Dior… And this, just for the fall-winter 2022-2023 season. If fashion has been particularly fond of them for a handful of seasons and if all the little girls love them at dance and at school, their return to favor also owes a lot to teleworking (which has exacerbated the quest for comfort) and yoga, whose number of followers has grown in a vertiginous way. There are now 300 million worldwide, according to Yoga. The encyclopedia (Albin Michel, 2021).
Moreover, these neo-yogis, often urban and connected, have made leggings a star of Instagram and TikTok since this “magical” garment seems to produce on screen an improved version of oneself by managing to both mold the legs, flatten the belly, bulge the buttocks and embody the idea of ”well-being” and “time for oneself” so dear at the time. A healthy body in healthy clothing? Not frankly.
hormone yoga
On April 8, in an amphitheater of the Institut français de la mode, in Paris, in front of a jury of professionals, stood the students of the sustainable fashion certificate, offered as part of the Fashion Sustainability IFM-Kering chair, created in 2019 Ten small groups of students followed one another to present the work they have been working on since November 2021. First to go on stage, Charlotte Muller, Salomé Bodin, Laura Correa and Carla Bore came to explain their “zero plastic leggings” project. . The idea has obsessed Charlotte Muller for several years. The 36-year-old young woman, a former lawyer specializing in arbitration, recruited to the legal department of Total, then to Airbus, changed her life five years ago, following several hormonal problems, and in particular a syndrome of polycystic ovaries.
“When, at 28, I found myself in a gynecologist’s waiting room because I hadn’t had my period for six months, I was surrounded by 40-year-old women who came to consult to get pregnant, says Charlotte Muller. But the patient base has changed. Today, those who come for infertility are between 20 and 30 years old. » Worried for her, but also aware that the problem goes beyond her personal case, she decided, at 31, after leaving Airbus, to set up a “Yoga start-up” to connect teachers and individuals or companies. The idea does not turn out to be as promising as expected, but the courses she gives in parallel are always full.
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