Gym Gear Killed Retail

Online shopping is not the only culprit.

The closure of department stores like Sears in Canada and stores that specialize in women’s clothes in particular, can also be attributed to the dress casualization of formal spaces.

Casualization, is a terrible pretentious word typical of higher education which uses big words to describe ordinary things like dressing up, with the intention to exclude people who did not go to school or attained higher education.

Casual and formal dressing has been there since the beginning of time.  Traditional societies have day to day clothes for working the land, tending animals or seducing fish from rivers and the sea.  Then they have special clothes for ceremonies to thank nature for its generosity and pray for future produce.

The current book on this confused desk is The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee.  Someone dresses the dead girl in a white deerskin dress that was intended for her wedding.  It’s a wild guess but, weddings have not been affected by dress casualization that much, unlike restaurants, the office or air travel.  The prom dress also seems to be surviving. 

How has that affected store closures, and where do gym clothes come in?  Good double question.  More and more women dress casual in the year 2019.  The office dress code is relaxed now, and they don’t dress up to go to the mall, movies, visit friends and family, even go to church. 

Gym clothes, stores call Active Wear, are the new casual, with black leotards/leggings leading the way because they go with everything and camouflage dirt.  In fact, they are very popular as uniforms in some businesses.  Formal dressing comes with a cost i.e. special shoes, handbags and hats. 

Speaking of hats.  The old guard in African American and South African churches cannot imagine being hatless on Sunday, although they are losing kids and grandkids to the casual trend.  Black movies like Forest Whitaker’s Waiting to Exhale all have scenes where characters are hatted.  Does such a word exist?   

Gym clothes like the black spandex are cheaper because they are fit-all-occasions, making the formal sections of clothing stores redundant.  All they need are sneakers and they don’t mind flat shoes or even pumps.  Dress casualization also blurs class lines.  Women look and feel the same.

We can even take casualization to bed.  Declining sales in sleepwear could be attributed to the death of formal pyjamas because we sleep in old T-shirts and don’t own dressing gowns.

The source to shop will be broken if the black spandex preference continues, because the clothing industry consists of designers, cloth merchants, sewing, advertising, packing and distribution. 

By:  Nonqaba waka Msimang.