Every decade has its defining fashion, and in the 2020s, it’s hard to find a more apparent trend than athleisure. While it’s perfectly understandable to attribute the activewear obsession to the KarJenners strutting about town in sports bras and all those Pilates classes that Kaia Gerber is spotted attending, its roots date back a century.
In the 1920s, one Madame Balouzet Tillard de Tigny opened a couture house specialising exclusively in sportswear—a radical proposition at a time when even the most fashion-forward maisons were treating sport as an occasional dalliance. At the time, Gabrielle Chanel and Jean Patou were incorporating “sporty” clothes into their collections, but de Tigny had made sport the focal point of hers. There was, of course, a reason for this: the woman behind the house was better known as Jane Régny, celebrated French tennis player and golfer, who had turned her sporting credentials into a couture career.
Some things, it seems, never go out of fashion. Leisure has been a luxury for generations, and fashion has been perfectly happy to dress the part. Today, that might mean turning up to the treadmill in a new studio set or going for a HIIT session with a gym bag that costs more than the actual class. This year’s designer wellness collections suggest that we’ve had the right idea all along. The proof is in the pudding—or, shall we say, the green juice.
Below, the most luxurious activewear launches of 2026.
The Haute Wellness Dior Collection by Dior Maison
Downward dog has rarely looked this expensive. Dior would have you stretch into it on something stamped with cannage. The Haute Wellness collection arrives via Cordelia de Castellane, artistic director of Dior Maison and Baby Dior, who applies the maison’s signature pattern to the rituals of movement, mindfulness, and sleep.
The fitness set—resistance bands, weights, rings, and a cork yoga block—is traced with cannage in fine gold thread, the motif derived from the chairs of Christian Dior’s salons and most famous on the Lady Dior bag. Here it lends even a resistance band a certain reluctance to be treated casually; it looks as convincing arranged in a home gym as part of the furniture.
The Pilates mat, steel water bottle, and cannage silk pillowcase and eye mask extend the well-dressed routine, while the 5 Minute Journal rounds things off with daily prompts. Wellness, in this instance, is not reinvented but outfitted—and rather insistently so.
NikeSkims
As Kim Kardashian once jokingly declared to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, she possesses a kind of “superpower” for setting trends. The claim proved more true than satirical. She has spent a decade demonstrating that activewear’s greatest success was not in the gym but in convincing the public to wear it everywhere else, and Singapore is the latest stop on that victory lap—NikeSkims landed on home shores last month.
The name is an easy portmanteau of two dominant brands and a neat summary of the athleisure aesthetic they’ve made their own. Its latest innovation, Studio Stretch, is built for low-impact workouts and described as the label’s softest, lightest offering yet: Lycra Adaptiv and Nike’s Dri-Fit technology combine compression, stretch, and moisture management with a buttery hand feel. The design strips away overt sport cues across 11 figure-hugging silhouettes, from bras to a scoop-back one-piece, cut with minimal seams in a strict rotation of soft neutrals. Call it studio wear if you must, but it’s clearly already on its way to brunch.
Burberry Activewear
When Thomas Burberry developed his gabardine in 1847, he was thinking not only of fashion statements but of how clothing could support an active lifestyle. That instinct still lingers, and its 21st-century counterpart is Burberry Activewear—though here, being active has extended beyond sport towards a more polished, wellness-minded everyday uniform.
Lightweight nylon now replaces gabardine’s weather-beaten practicality across men’s and women’s pieces: training tops, joggers, and gilets fitted with elastic bands. As a reminder that this is Burberry, the collection is punctuated with elevated choices—silken cashmere in a ribbed women’s T-shirt, suede on men’s running shoes, gabardine on a selection of caps. House signatures are reinterpreted, too: the Burberry Check surfaces in perforated treatments, while the Equestrian Knight appears in a reflective gradient on T-shirts and hooded jackets, as if caught in motion. It is a fitting symbol for a collection that knows how much an “active lifestyle” has changed. Thomas Burberry may have had explorers in mind—nearly two centuries later, today’s equivalent is just as likely to be headed to a reformer class.
This story originally appeared in the August 2026 issue of GRAZIA Singapore.
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