Jogging: Uniform of a Weary Civilization

Western civilization’s steady decline may be measured not only in its politics or its culture, but in something far simpler: what its people choose to wear. The three-piece suit once told a story of restraint, rank, and representation. The dress, the hat, the tailored jacket imposed a minimal discipline on the body, reminding the wearer that entering the world meant more than simply leaving the house—it meant consenting to form. The tracksuit, by contrast, tells a different story: the triumph of comfort over composure, of ease over elegance, of collapse over carriage.

As Valeurs Actuelles reports, the tracksuit does not truly clothe. It is worn not to appear, but to withdraw. It has become the socially acceptable pajama, the garment of a humanity that no longer wishes to confront the world but merely to pass through it while cushioning the blows. The gods of modernity no longer demand sacrifice. They ask only that one be comfortable. This era no longer seeks beauty, much less nobility. It simply wishes not to be inconvenienced.

The tracksuit once had its place of honor. Originally, it belonged to the athlete, to the body in motion, to the democratization of leisure. It spoke of effort, earned relaxation, freedom won from bourgeois rigidity. But as often happens, freedom slid into slackness, and slackness became the norm. From the stadium, the tracksuit migrated to the couch. From the couch, it descended into the street. From the street, it entered the Zoom meeting. No one knows anymore whether they are working, sleeping, or training. The age itself no longer seems to distinguish.

The Greeks had the cloak, the Romans the toga, knights wore armor, peasants wore rough wool, aristocrats the frock coat. Each world had its silhouette—that is, a certain idea of man. Look now at the crowds in the metro: fleece pants, shapeless sweatshirts, hoods pulled low, sneakers inflated like SUV tires. An entire population of blurred, gray, interchangeable silhouettes appears to have renounced the very idea of presenting itself. The tracksuit has become the garment of neutrality. It says almost nothing: neither sex nor class nor profession nor mood. It erases rough edges, abolishes signs, neutralizes belonging. It is the paradoxical uniform of a society obsessed with identity yet incapable of assuming a form.

The ancients understood that to dress was already to stand ready. One did not clothe oneself merely to cover nakedness, but to enter an order. Each civilization had its silhouette, which is to say a certain conception of humanity. Ours has the tracksuit: a promise of non-conflict, a garment that demands nothing and promises nothing.

The irony is that this garment of indifferentiation reigns at a time when distinction is discussed everywhere. The great luxury houses, always quick to transform decadence into a derivative product, now sell fleece pants at extravagant prices. So-called couture tracksuits claim to reinvent what has precisely no form. Luxury imitates the street, the street imitates influencers, influencers imitate the couch. The rapper, the student, the Instagram starlet, and the airport tourist commune in the same softness.

The Death of Human Verticality

The most serious consequence is anthropological. The tracksuit has killed something of human verticality. In a suit, in a fitted dress, in a well-cut jacket, the body receives a discreet command: stand up straight. Clothing reminds man that he has an axis. The tracksuit, by contrast, accommodates every defeat of posture. One slumps in it, sprawls in it, folds into it. It embraces fatigue before it even arrives.

A civilization is also measured by what it silently demands of its members. Ours demands very little. It prefers to “de-dramatize,” to “deconstruct,” to “take care.” The tracksuit has become the natural habit of this saccharine morality that transforms every renunciation into virtue. The vocabulary of wellness has covered laziness with a therapeutic veneer.

Fashion magazines, always a season ahead of capitulation, speak of a “care aesthetic,” of “chic comfort,” of a “relaxed silhouette.” As if abandonment needed a manifesto. This may be the surest sign of our collective aging: we dream of being dressed like children but treated like adults. We want protection without constraint, comfort without composure, freedom without duties.

The Emblem of a Terminal Civilization

Perhaps the tracksuit is, in the end, the perfect emblem of a terminal civilization: a synthetic fabric, mass-produced, without memory, without homeland, without demands, whose sole virtue is that it does not inconvenience. Western society has traded the vertical for the horizontal, the composed for the comfortable, the citizen for the consumer. What people wear reveals what they have become—and what they have ceased to expect of themselves.

The tracksuit generation has inherited institutions, freedoms, and prosperity built by those who knew how to stand upright, both literally and figuratively. Yet it shuffles through life in elastic waistbands, unable or unwilling to bear even the minimal burden of a collar or a belt. This is not progress. It is not liberation. It is the sartorial surrender of a civilization that has forgotten why it once bothered to get dressed at all.

With information from Valeurs Actuelles