100 percent polyester workout fits? These athleisure brands are worth your attention

Most of India’s athleisure boom has been built around the same three things: polyester, lycra, and a marketing deck full of “squat proof” and “sweat wicking” promises. The category grew so quickly that, for a lot of new brands, copying what already worked became the easiest way in. Which is why it’s worth taking a second before you buy and asking a few simple questions instead of taking the label at face value. What is the fabric actually made of? Does the brand tell you clearly, or does it hide behind vague phrases like “performance blend”? And is the fit designed with an actual body type in mind, or has a Western size chart simply been resized and repackaged?

Then there’s the bigger question: does the brand actually have something to say? Maybe it has a distinct design language, a cultural reference point, or has figured out a technical problem that other brands haven’t. Or maybe it’s selling the same leggings and sports bras everyone else is, just in a slightly different colour with a much bigger marketing budget. The athleisure brands worth paying attention to usually have a clear answer to at least one of these questions. And when they do, that answer tends to be the reason you remember them.

Sister Says

It helps to think of these brands as sitting on a spectrum, with fabric on one end and design language on the other, and most of the interesting names right now are pushing hard on one side of it. Freecultr sits firmly on the fabric end, and it makes sense once you know it started as an innerwear label, since that’s an obsession with how something feels against skin that just carried straight into activewear once the brand moved into bamboo and organic cotton blends instead of the usual polyester mix. Heelium takes that same instinct and pushes it even further, building almost its entire range around bamboo, which is naturally breathable and antimicrobial without needing the chemical finishing most synthetic fabric relies on to fake the same effect. 

On the other hand, Kshm  isn’t really chasing a fabric innovation story so much as a design one, pulling from classic Indian silhouettes and building workout and lounge wear on pure loom cotton that actually looks rooted in Indian textile tradition instead of a copy paste of Western gymwear, and that’s honestly one of the more original ideas in the category right now. Splits59 is doing a version of that same design first thinking, just filtered through a retro, studio inspired aesthetic instead of a cultural one, which is why it doesn’t look like everything else on a gym floor. 

PANGAIA, developing its own materials like seaweed based fibre and plant based down alternatives, so the innovation isn’t a marketing line sitting on top of the product, it’s the actual starting point for it.

Sister Shops: 

Freecultr 

Heelium

Kshm

The Splits59

PANGAIA