The athleisure boom in the US now encompasses sneakers and tops and even fashion brands. For years, many people associated the term athleisure with Lululemon and yoga pants, and believed the entire trend would be short-lived. Neither is the case anymore. Americans are obsessed with wearing athletic gear as all-day fashion. People are buying athletically-inspired products with no intention of actually doing sports in them. This is a fundamental shift for the industry, and it’s allowing brands that do not have a sports heritage to come in and take some share.

The trend of wearing athletic sneakers all day means that buyers no longer look only to sports brands when they want to buy sneakers. Madden, Sperry, Ecco, and Gucci, for instance, are all growing rapidly in the athletic shoe space. For the first 40 or 50 years of the modern sneaker marketplace, at least one performance category was in fashion. In the ’70s it was tennis. The ’80s was the basketball decade. But for nearly four years now, no performance sneaker category (shoes made to be worn for playing sports) has seen positive growth in America. That’s unprecedented. Performance basketball sneakers, in particular, have got crushed by athleisure. That category was down 20 per cent in the first quarter of 2019.