Olivia Newton-John's 'Physical' Lycra Legacy

Athleisure, leggings, shapewear owe a debt of gratitude to the iconic video.

A funny thing happened when Kameron Lennox revisited the music video for "Physical", the 1981 pop mega hit by Olivia Newton-John, who died on Monday.

For the most of the video sees Ms. Newton-John bouncing around a gym training and terrorizing out-of-shape men while wearing a white leotard. In true 1980s fashion, this leotard was layered over magenta leggings and under a robin's egg blue shirt, cinched in with a belt and accessorized with thick socks and a headband.

As a Hollywood costume designer preparing to work on the Apple TV+ aerobics comedy-drama also called "Physical", starring Rose Byrne, Ms. Lennox saw something she hadn't noticed when she was child.

The white leotard was "growing in the groin area," said Ms. Lennox, who wondered if it was a leotard or of a leotard made from a large t-shirt. "The background looks like a layer. It looks very homemade. Looks like the modes, in fact, were about to happen."

Thanks to the video, which coincided with the dawn of MTV, "Physical" is remembered as a kind of anthem of the age of aerobics - despite lyrics that are really more about lovemaking than cardio. Ms Newton-John's ensemble also became a sartorial symbol of that era - despite the rudimentary construction of the leotard, which "is definitely not a workout outfit", said Ms Lennox, who ended up inspiration from costume design. of lesser known aerobics instructors like Bess Motta.

In this sense, the "Physical" set is also an early example of athleisure, a term originally used to describe not exercise clothing , but casual clothes that looked like exercise clothes.< /p>

ImageJane Fonda popularized workout videos in the 1980s.Credit...Paul Popper/Popperfoto, via Getty Images

time. It was the birth of the 80s headband fashion craze. I should have started a headband and leggings business or made fitness videos. Jane Fonda beat me to it."

It's true that no one popularized aerobics and the ballet-inspired aesthetic of aerobics more than Mrs. Fonda , who opened a workout studio in 1979 and published the best-selling "Jane Fonda's Workout Book" in 1981. But "Physical" came close, bringing a spray hairspray bomb to a discount trend. in shape - the dance exercise - that was already poised to light up the decade. Not only because of the dance-centric pop culture phenomena of the decade ("Fame" in 1980, "Flashdance" in 1983 , "Footloose" in 1984) but because of the re-emergence of a textile invented in 1958: Lycra, known generically as spandex.

Ms. Newton's video -John "crystallized, in a matter of minutes in visual form, what was happening ac...