Yoga pants are everywhere.
I sometimes wonder why they are so popular. But that’s not a very fruitful question. It’s easy to list a bunch of benefits to a product or trend as believable reasons for its popularity. All good reasons. But reasons why people like something don’t shed much light on a phenomenon. They don’t tell us why those benefits outweigh the benefits of alternative choices. And they don’t explain why, if the benefits are true, it took so long for people to realize them?
In other words, every time a big trend pops onto the scene the better question than why is why not sooner?
I did a few minutes of Googling for clues as to the timing of the yoga pant explosion. It seems possible that advances in materials played a role. Some of the blends the pants are made from are only a few decades old. It’s possible that the power of the Lululemon brand and their successful stores in fashionable cities played a role.
It’s easy for these questions to get answered in one of two ways. One camp looks for a material answer. Some new tech or shift in commodity prices that explains it all. It feels sturdy, and it enhances the belief in humans as efficient machines whose emotions and subjective preferences are just a post hoc veneer for material decisions. The other camp looks for a psychological answer. A new brand, a star in a movie, an emotional attachment to a person or event explains it all. It enhances the belief that humans are irrational beings whose baser passions are the driving force behind economic activity and resource allocation.
It’s hard to sort out real causes of trends. I don’t think the dichotomy between ‘rational, economizing man’, and, ‘irrational, passion-driven man’ is a useful one. There is a logic of human action that doesn’t require people to have perfect information and needs no standard definition of ‘good’ actions or resource use. People can become emotionally attached to a resource because of its usefulness, or they can make a resource useful because of an emotional attachment. Neither is damning or elevating evidence for the human condition.
It is true, the underlying economics have to make sense. If people decided platinum pants were the bees knees, they wouldn’t likely achieve the ubiquity of yoga pants because platinum isn’t stretchy or abundant. It’s also true that individuals with vision, passion, motivation, and commitment to drive an idea forward have to be there to create a brand, distribution, and market. Just because jorts are an objectively, materially wonderful form of summerwear doesn’t mean people won’t make fun of me for wearing them. Some committed jorts entrepreneur needs to bring the world along to the realization of jorts glory like Lululemon did for yoga pants.
I’m not fully satisfied with any easy explanations for the emergence of trends like yoga pants. And I’m not satisfied saying, ‘It’s complicated’. I guess if I could really figure it out, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. I’d be using my understanding to find and invest in the next big trend.