Fashion In Anime: The Perfect Show For Gym Rats
I miss the gym.
I haven’t gone in a while due to school commitments. All the muscle I have built up has disappeared into thin air and will take some work to gain back. Luckily, I built muscle relatively quickly, but that’s beside the true point. When in the gym, there are (at least) two types of girls:
The tank top girls or sports bra girls
Personally, I’m neither (see at the bottom), but let’s learn a bit about women’s workout clothes. Not to be confused with the tracksuit uniform.
In the 1800s, there were decency codes that prevented women from showing skin and body contours (“too suggestive”), as well as from dressing like men (“too threatening”).
“In much of the West, it was considered indecent, if not illegal, for women to wear pants until the early 1900s, and they weren’t worn with much frequency until the 1920s, when designers like Coco Chanel and Jean Patou (who both have pieces in “Sporting Fashion”) made them fashionable.” — CNN
In terms of what we wear to the gym today, the earliest similarity between what we wear now versus then is the 1960s. Right before the turn of the decade, spandex was created and immediately took over the fitness world.
“The word “aerobic” was first used, as a doctor named Kenneth Cooper published a book of the same name that touted that this new workout was “the most effective physical fitness plan ever for men and women.” For the first time, women sweating while working out was not only accepted, but encouraged” — Byrdie
As for the characters from How Heavy Are The Dumbells You Lift? it seems like the more petite girls show more skin while their slightly heavier counterparts opt for a tank top. Although that’s typically how gym fashion in real life works, people of all size ultimately wear a variety of fits regardless of size.
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