It’s just after 9 a.m. on September 8, and the weather in New York City is perfect. The sun is shining brightly. The temperature hovers around 70 degrees. The dew point is very low. On Bleecker Street, it seems like every woman who goes to get coffee or hit the gym wears the exact same outfit: bike shorts and a baggy sweatshirt. Including me.
Sometimes I can’t tell you why I succumb to a clothing trend—so many of the clothes hanging in my closet feel like they were purchased by the invisible hand of Adam Smith, polished by Essie. But this particular dress? I can tell you exactly where it comes from: Princess Diana.
Oh yes. Every September, users on TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram start retweeting old photos of Princess Diana leaving the gym in spandex and a statement jumper. In one popular photo, she’s wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the Virgin Atlantic logo; another shows Harvard’s crest. (She had a soft spot for American colleges: In addition to her Ivy League schools, she often wore Northwestern University’s bright purple design.) Some even called it “Princess Diana’s fall” — or, the nine glorious weeks of the month when it’s warm enough to still show your legs, but cool enough to wear a cozy sweatshirt.
How did it become popular? Of course, part of it is that Diana was one of the best-dressed women in history and therefore an eternal inspiration for designers. (For example, Tory Burch cited her as the inspiration for her Spring 2020 collection, and Rowing Blazers recently reissued her Warm and Wonderful sweater.) However, her athleisure looks also have a fascinating history.
Princess Diana never liked being photographed in a tracksuit and even went out of her way to avoid doing so. Yet there was incredible demand for personal photos of Princess Diana: In 1993, The Mirror reportedly paid £150,000 for photos of her working out at a health club. (The princess later sought legal action.) In gym parking lots, she would often get out of her car and back away to avoid being exposed to photographers. But her greatest hack? She would wear the same outfit every time: spandex bike shorts with a sweatshirt, over and over again. Doing so would reduce the value of paparazzi photos – no newspaper would pay top dollar to feature an outfit on a page they’ve already featured.
“Every practice, all the media was camped out with stepladders, cameras, lenses and everything,” her personal trainer Jenny Rivett recalled in a 2018 interview. ——She didn’t ask for any of that. I remember one of her strategies was that she would wear the same Virgin Active jersey every time she trained.
One side effect of her obsession with garment repetition was that the style became synonymous with Diana herself. Furthermore, while most of the clothes worn by Princess Diana were custom-made or designer, this dress was definitely – and achievable – high street style. “What is new is not the combination itself, but the way people did it at that time,” said Laia Garcia-Furtado, senior fashion editor at Eskume. “But in her case, it changed, probably because it is rare to see people of her stature ‘dressed plainly’, and also because it was a result of her indescribable charm.”
The 2010s saw the full power of online and social media culture. Photos of Princess Diana appeared not just in magazines or newspapers, but also on blogs, Twitter and the Instagram Discover page. This was the time when athleisure became a major trend, with companies like Lululemon and Alo Yoga generating billions of dollars in revenue. Suddenly, Diana’s 90s tracksuits seem incredibly stylish. This all came to a head in 2019 when Hailey Bieber (a huge fashion influencer in her own right) recreated Princess Diana’s bike shorts and sweatshirt look for the Escome France editorial Climax. The photos quickly went viral.
The coming weeks are shaping up to be some of the most pleasant weather of the year across much of the United States. So put on your favorite sweatshirt and get out there. You deserve a lot of glory.
