Nearly A Third Of Women Feel Self-Conscious In Activewear, Study Finds

Women Are Wearing Leggings Everywhere, and Nearly a Third Feel Bad About Their Bodies While Doing It

Leggings, bike shorts, and crop tops have conquered grocery stores, coffee shops, and living rooms across countries such as Australia and the United States. Athletic clothing, once reserved for the gym, has become everyday wear for countless women. But a large new study out of Australia suggests this booming fashion trend may carry a hidden psychological cost.

Women who engaged more with activewear tended to report stronger desires to meet certain body standards and, in some groups, more appearance comparison, media pressure, and body monitoring. Separately, nearly 30% of women who wore activewear said they felt self-conscious in it at least half the time. The study does not prove that activewear causes those feelings, but it does raise questions about what this clothing trend is selling beyond comfort.

Brands like Gymshark, Lorna Jane, and others have built empires by telling women their products will inspire active lifestyles, build community, and boost body confidence. It’s a compelling pitch, and consumers have bought in. Researchers at Edith Cowan University in Australia wanted to know whether those psychological promises hold up when tested against real data from real women.

What they found is complicated. Activewear engagement does correspond with more time spent exercising, a genuine benefit. But the researchers found no evidence that wearing, buying, browsing for, or following activewear brands on social media was connected to feeling better about one’s body or oneself in general. Instead, the data pointed in a more troubling direction.

Activewear Has Left the Gym, and Most Women Wear It Everywhere

Survey data came from 829 women across two groups: 455 undergraduate students at an Australian university and 374 women from the broader Australian community, recruited through social media ads and a paid panel. The student group averaged about 28 years old; the community group averaged around 44.

Participants answered questions about four activewear behaviors: how many days per week they wore it, how much they’d spent in the past six months, how many minutes per week they spent browsing for it online, and how many brands they followed on social media. Women who wore activewear recently were also asked where they wore it and how often they felt self-conscious doing so.

Engagement was widespread. In the student group, 87% had worn activewear in the last month and 82% had purchased it in the last six months. Even in the older community group, 76% had recently worn it and 71% had recently bought it. Between 56% and 67% of women had browsed for activewear online in the past month, and 40% to 48% followed at least one brand on social media.

Perhaps the most telling finding was about context. Women wore activewear for exercise less than half the time, about 47% in the student group and 41% in the community group. Only around 10% of women across both groups said they exclusively wore activewear for working out. The rest wore it to run errands, hang out at home, attend social events, go to work, or head to school.

Activewear and Body Image: No Confidence Boost, but Real Risks

Despite activewear brands frequently promoting their products as tools for empowerment, the researchers found no connection between any measure of activewear engagement and either body appreciation or self-esteem. Not wearing frequency, not spending, not online browsing, not social media following. None of it correlated with women feeling better about their bodies.

Activewear engagement did show a positive link to fitness activity, with women who wore and spent more on activewear also tending to log more hours exercising each week. Even fitness activity itself, though, didn’t translate into higher body appreciation or self-esteem in this dataset, a finding the researchers noted with some surprise.

The associations with negative psychological factors were far more consistent. Across both groups, women who engaged more with activewear reported stronger desires to achieve a muscular, athletic body type. In the community sample, more frequent wearing was also linked to stronger desires to be thin with low body fat, more frequent appearance comparisons with other women, greater perceived pressure from media to look better, and more body surveillance, the habit of constantly monitoring how one’s body looks.

Older Women May Face Greater Activewear Body Image Risks

An unexpected pattern emerged when researchers split the community sample by age, using 40 as the dividing line. Contrary to expectations, the associations between activewear engagement and negative body image factors were actually larger among women 40 and older. Many of the links between activewear habits and media pressure, appearance comparisons, and body monitoring only showed up strongly in the older group. Researchers raised the possibility that body image among older women may be under greater threat when they engage with activewear.

For a global market projected to reach $450 billion by 2028, built partly on the promise of making women feel good about themselves, the gap between what these brands market and what the data actually show deserves a closer look.

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Disclaimer: The findings of this study are correlational and do not establish that activewear causes negative body image outcomes. Results are based on survey data from Australian women and may not apply equally across all populations, cultures, or countries.

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