Lululemon Isn’t Worried About Naming Its New Pant ‘Naked’

A yogi practicing in Lululemon’s “naked” yoga pants. (Photo: Getty Images)

Lululemon has made a lot of money by selling a yoga pant. Not pants — literally just one style brought the brand billions. The company, without even meaning to, spearheaded athleisure, reinventing the way women dress not only to exercise but in their downtime as well. Since Lululemon’s launch in 1998, its offerings have expanded to include shirts, shorts, and various other items in spandex, but the iconic pants have consistently remained the same — until now. On Tuesday, Lululemon introduced a new design and categorization system that, it believes, will alter the way women shop for active pants.

Moving away from silhouettes, bottoms will now be sorted by engineered sensations: relaxed, naked, held-in, hugged, and tight. “Our guests now have the choice on how they want to feel,” Antonia Iamartino, design director of Future Concepts, tells Yahoo Style. “One of the things that is grounded in that feel is level of training compression.” In other words, customers can choose pants that correlate with their desired activity, such as running, cycling, or yoga.

Through lots of research with customers and professional athletes alike, the design team figured out the exact amount of compression to have an appropriate physiological impact on the body’s performance. The design team behind the innovation was also keenly aware that one’s level of function is linked to how you feel. “If someone feels fast, strong, held-in, or they feel naked … then they simply feel fantastic and can hit their ultimate performance,” Iamartino says.

Part of the reason for introducing more options is that customers were having to hack their pants to find the perfect fit. If they found the appropriate tightness, the length wouldn’t work. If the looseness seemed right, they’d have to get them tailored. Iamartino works in a store once a week — all the design team does —and noticed guests doing this and wanted to figure out a solution to fit everyone’s needs.

The rising athleisure trend came to mind as well for the shift, considering the fact that yoga pants outside the yoga studio is largely responsible for Lululemon’s success. “We always design first from function and then, from that, design items that can be stylish as well,” she says. “We look at our products as being highly versatile.”

Expanding its options could be exactly what Lululemon needs to maintain its stronghold on the market. Other brands have crept onto Lululemon’s territory in the past few years, including Athleta, Under Armour, celebrity-endorsed collections from Carrie Underwood and Kate Hudson, designer-backed lines from Phillip Lim and Tory Burch, and even Gap, Old Navy, Forever21, and H&M. According to new research, yoga pants have seen 341 percent growth in new arrivals in the past three months compared with the same period in 2014.

The expansion also comes at a time when the brand is attempting to recover from some bad publicity it has experienced over the past few years: Founder Chip Wilson made some fat-shaming comments surrounding the brand’s quality, and in 2013, the Canadian company had to issue a recall of stretchy black yoga pants that were so thin they were see-through. In regards to the latter controversy, Iamartino doesn’t see a correlation or issue with naming the new pant “naked.” The lightweight, tight-fitting pant, which retails for $98, aims to “maximize comfort and minimize distraction” on the yoga mat and is made with light compression and a high waistband to smooth lines.

“I don’t have concern around calling it naked because we really are engineering an experience that is that, so to not call it what it is wouldn’t have felt right,” she says. “That was really the ultimate experience we were going after to create, so people can link whatever, but we are very confident with that [name choice] and we are very committed to quality.”

All new styles are now on the website and became available in stores on Sept. 1.

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