All The Gear, No Idea?

We’ve written about this relationship at Glorious at considerable length. In Beyond the Hype, we explored the appetite for luxury sportswear collaborations, while The Long Game examined the growing influence of sport across the fashion industry. We’ve covered the runway shows, the designer football kits, the athletes and the trainers that have never been anywhere near a running track. And believe you me, I could write another 2,000 words on the subject. Hello, LOEWE and On, Cecilie Bahnsen and The North Face, and Balenciaga designing boxer Ramla Ali’s kit. There’s little point pretending fashion has only just discovered sport, although judging by the number of collaborations being announced, you’d be forgiven for thinking somebody had recently invented exercise.

The sporting accessories themselves are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Chanel’s latest collections include padel equipment and skis. Louis Vuitton sells padel rackets too. Dior has gone all-in on the business of wellness, offering yoga mats, Pilates rings, yoga blocks and enough high-end exercise accessories to furnish a boutique studio. Prada has tennis accessories and leather ball holders that somehow manage to elevate one of the cheapest objects in sport into something deserving of luxury accommodation. Saint Laurent and Prada have both experimented with table tennis because, apparently, there exists a customer demographic capable of looking at a perfectly serviceable ping-pong bat and thinking it would benefit from a fashion house logo.

I’ve spent enough years working in fashion to know that Chanel isn’t trying to become Wilson. Prada isn’t attempting to overthrow Head. Dior’s future does not depend on dominating the global yoga block market. These products are produced in tiny quantities, aimed at tiny audiences, and scarcity is part of the appeal. Luxury houses have always made strange things for wealthy customers. What’s different is how effectively these things travel. A handbag appears in a fashion magazine. A Louis Vuitton padel racket appears in fashion magazines, sports websites, business publications, TikToks, Instagram reels and group chats full of people asking who on earth would spend that much money on it. The product is often secondary. The conversation isn’t. And the fact that I’m writing about designer sporting equipment for an audience that might never otherwise give Chanel a second thought is proof that the exercise is working.

That’s particularly relevant at a moment when luxury fashion is having what can politely be described as an uncomfortable period of self-reflection. After years of relentless price increases, some of the industry’s biggest names are discovering that customers are no longer willing to accept ever-rising prices simply because a familiar logo is attached. Consumers are asking harder questions about quality and value. Independent designers are attracting attention. Experiences increasingly carry more social currency than possessions. Luxury remains enormously powerful, but it feels less culturally dominant than it once did, which may explain why so many of its biggest names are attaching themselves to activities that other people have already made desirable.

Of course, who’s buying all this depends enormously on where they’re buying it. The luxury customer in London isn’t necessarily shopping like the luxury customer in Shanghai. According to McKinsey’s State of Luxury report, wealthy American shoppers are becoming more interested in challenger brands, while Chinese consumers continue to place greater value on established names and brand authority. Luxury sporting equipment isn’t necessarily aimed at the wealthy Londoner who pairs Zara trousers with a Celine coat. It may appeal more to customers for whom luxury extends from the wardrobe to the ski equipment, gym bag and tennis racket.

Watching luxury fashion enthusiastically embrace whichever activity currently occupies a certain corner of the cultural imagination can occasionally feel like discovering someone has just become obsessed with a television series everyone else finished two years ago. Then again, perhaps that says more about the rest of us than it does about them.

There are only so many handbags, watches, tailored jackets, sports cars and holiday homes a billionaire can reasonably acquire before even luxury fashion starts running out of ideas. Eventually somebody has to sit in a meeting room and ask whether the world is ready for a Prada tennis-ball holder, and apparently the answer is yes. One begins to suspect these objects are less about sport than optionality. Whatever wealthy people decide they’re into next, luxury fashion would quite like to be waiting there already, preferably with excellent craftsmanship and calfskin detailing.

To be fair, sport and luxury have always overlapped, though usually in the opposite direction. Hermès began making saddles and harnesses in 1837 before becoming a luxury powerhouse. Pringle of Scotland was a knitwear pioneer whose clothing found its way onto golf courses, while Lacoste was founded by an actual tennis champion. These brands built their reputations on something practical before becoming fashion staples. And let’s not forget Karl Lagerfeld sending Linda Evangelista down the Chanel runway carrying a surfboard back in 1990. It was playful, a bit ridiculous and very much part of the joke. Lagerfeld wasn’t proposing that Chanel become the next big name in surfing. What’s changed is the direction of travel. Today’s luxury houses aren’t evolving out of sport or simply having a bit of fun with it on the runway. They’re putting their logos on existing sporting equipment and turning what was once an occasional novelty into an entire product category, whether or not anyone previously associated them with athletic endeavour.

Viewed through that lens, luxury sporting equipment starts to look a little less absurd. A Louis Vuitton racket case isn’t subtle. Nor is a Prada table-tennis set. Neither is an impeccably arranged collection of Dior Pilates equipment occupying an entire corner of a home gym larger than most London flats. These aren’t objects designed to disappear quietly into the background. They’re conversation pieces. They’re evidence. They’re demonstrations.

For decades, luxury fashion largely acted as a cultural headquarters. Trends emerged from fashion and filtered outward. Increasingly, the relationship appears to be working in reverse. Running clubs built their own culture. Pilates built its own status. Tennis never stopped looking aspirational. Wellness became an industry long before luxury fashion arrived carrying a yoga mat. Fashion is looking out into the world, identifying where aspiration already exists and finding increasingly inventive ways to attach itself to it.