It is Monday morning. Women everywhere stare blankly into the closet wishing they could put their weekend yoga pants back on.
Now they are one step closer.
Retailers, designers and manufacturers of workday clothing brands are listening to women who want outfits that don’t require changing when home from the office and headed to the playroom floor. They are using new stretch fabrics in dressier pants you can pull on, and tops and dresses that pass overhead—often without any buttons, zippers or snaps. Four-inch heels have springs and extra cushioning. Some sporty looks have trickled down from fashion runways and even pajamas can pass for everyday chic. Stylists caution that a relaxed look may require extra primping to appear professional.
Comfort is now the top reason women make clothing purchases, surpassing fit, price, styling and quality, according to NPD Group’s consumer tracking service. “Style has always been the number one reason women buy what they buy,” says Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst. Now, he says, “women want to be able to wake up, get dressed and wear the same outfit to work and work out in.”
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Some 86% of women say they are willing to sacrifice some amount of style for comfort, according to a survey of 549 women conducted by Harris Poll for Nielsen. Of those women who work outside the home, three-fourths say they often or always change into something more comfortable when they get home.
Kathryn Fernandez has two pairs of stretchy pants, both black, that she often rotates for work. The 34-year old senior brand manager at Unilever describes one pair as a cross between jeans and leggings with an elastic waistband; the other pants are a “dressy jogger” that feel like pajama pants. Ms. Fernandez says she is paying closer attention to how comfortable she is in what she wears to the office. When purchasing clothes, “if I don’t like the material or the way it feels in my hand, I won’t buy it,” she says.
Comfort, once a shunned topic in fashion circles, is now something that more designers talk about. A shoebox lid for four-inch Ilene Berg heels reads “Style that Oooohs. Comfort that Ahhhhs.” In footwear showrooms, conversations get technical. “It’s ‘look at the flexibility in that sole or the cushioning in the footbed,’” says Erica Russo, a fashion director at Bloomingdale’s. “It’s not a stigma to find comfort in a brand.”
Taking a cue from athletic wear and its derivative, “athleisure,” designers and retailers are turning to fabrics that stretch. Stretchy materials can provide comfort as well as hold-you-in control. Neoprene, a wetsuit material, is appearing in pea coats and skirts, while pants designers tout a “magical Lycra” that offers comfort and hides flaws.
Fabric innovations in Ann Taylor’s new spring collection are starting to appear in stores this month. Throughout the collection, which includes a diamond-weave pencil skirt and textured stripe sheath dress, “there’s a higher demand to have fabrics that not only look beautiful and refined but have this level of stretch and comfort and this hold-you-in quality,” says Austyn Zung, senior vice president and the brand’s new creative director of design.
One example, she says, is in a double-weave fabric made of polyester and rayon. “When it originated, it started as a mix that didn’t include any spandex,” she says. “We went back and said ‘Listen, we love the density of the fabric but we need a little bit of stretch in it.’” It now includes 5% spandex and appears in the collection’s pants, jackets and dresses.
Designers are rethinking pants. Varying measurements in hips, stomach and waist combined with different heights make slacks tricky to fit right. Montreal-based Lisette L has developed a pull-on pant with a hidden mesh “flaterie panel” that trims the tummy. It calls its fabric “magical Lycra,” made of 77% rayon, 20% nylon and 3% Lycra that weighs 275 grams per square meter. “The weight is very important,” says head of research and development Yvonne Lamers. “At 225 grams and under you’ll see cellulite bumps,” she says.
The brand has recently introduced a ponte knit. “With the strength of yoga wear, we felt a knit is important,” says Ms. Lamers. Its ponte knit is a blend of viscose, nylon and elastene. The fabric’s stretch, structure and drape makes it versatile and has allowed the brand to expand from pants to include jackets and skirts.
More women are turning to ponte knit pants for the office. They look somewhere between a legging, a yoga pant and a career pant and are a modern take on the flared pants that made ponte popular in the 1960s and 70s.
“It’s the greatest fabric,” says Rachel Wilder-Hill, vice president of design for Joie, a clothing brand that makes a ponte pant called the Annissa Pant which it refers to as “an updated legging silhouette.”
“It is like wearing a girdle but it doesn’t bag out at the end of the day,” says Ms. Wilder-Hill. Its versatility also makes it appealing to women who don’t want to change out of their office slacks.
Experts say that the push into synthetic fabrics accelerated when cotton prices soared past $2.00 a pound in 2011, compared with cotton’s average long-term price of 70 cents a pound, says José Sette, executive director of the International Cotton Advisory Committee. Many designers branched into Tencel, Modal, spandex and different variations of polyester, which helped pave the way for the athleticwear craze of recent years, says Jeffrey Silberman, chair of the textile development and marketing department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Four-way stretch—where fabric can stretch in both horizontal and vertical directions of a fabric’s structure—became available at lower price points. “A lot of fibers crept into the marketplace,” says Mr. Silberman. That, combined with new spinning and weaving technologies, has made high-performance fabrics more widely available.
Now, prices around 70 cents a pound driven by large overseas stockpiles is enabling many weavers, knitters and designers to use higher grades of cotton. At the same time, that has also encouraged innovations in synthetics and other fibers that compete with cotton. All of that “translates to a better and more comfortable product” for the consumer, says Mr. Silberman.
Designers are trying to make getting dressed in the morning easier by fusing separates together. “A lot of people don’t know how to layer,” says Ms. Wilder-Hill. A Joie “twofer sweater” features a contrast collar, sleeve cuffs and untucked shirt tail to appear as though the customer is wearing an untucked shirt underneath the sweater.
“It’s rare that we do zippers,” says Vernon, Calif., apparel company Bailey44 creative director Paola Nieto. “For the most part, everything is pull-on.” Some of her most popular designs are over-the-head dresses that look like two separate pieces. A Sedgewick Dress is made of a jersey top and a faux-leather skirt that look like the customer paired them together.
The emphasis on comfort in office wear has its dangers, says Raleigh Mayer, an executive consultant in New York, because it can easily look sloppy. “If you’re going to dress down, you need to groom up,” says Ms. Mayer. “The more relaxed the dress, the more important it is that the finishing touches are deliberate. If you don’t do your nails and don’t wear accessories, you can really look unfinished.”
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