One morning last month, on the day of Juicy Couture’s first-ever New
York Fashion Week runway show, Jamie Mizrahi, the company’s
twenty-nine-year-old creative director, posted a note to her hundred and
twenty-three thousand followers on
Instagram. “Nostalgia
has proven to be one of our brand’s greatest assets,” she wrote, “and I
truly believe it will be the springboard to launch us into the next
phase of the brand’s evolution.” In other words: We aren’t getting rid
of the tracksuits. Indeed, at the show later that
day,
in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Wolcott, Mizrahi presented the
brand’s iconic two-piece ensemble in a dozen remixed varietals: pink
sequin tracksuit, earth-tone tie-dye tracksuit, cabernet-colored
cashmere tracksuit, French terry-cloth tracksuit adorned with shimmery
paillettes, and a velvety maroon iteration with seventies-inspired
chevron stripes that looked like an off-duty training outfit for
Prefontaine. During the finale, just to make sure that viewers got the
message, there was a parade of thirty-four more.

Mizrahi was a teen-ager in the early aughts, when Juicy vaulted from a
modest operation in the San Fernando Valley to an inescapable global
juggernaut. She claims to have been enamored of the brand from the
moment that she bought her first tracksuit, at an outlet mall in
Livingston, New Jersey. “It was waffle material and it was oatmeal
colored and I thought I was the coolest person ever for having it,” she
told a fashion blog.
A Los Angeles-based celebrity stylist with clients including Katy Perry,
Riley Keough, and Suki Waterhouse, Mizrahi joined the company last fall,
in the hopes of rescuing it from a protracted period of uncertainty. In
2014, Juicy shuttered all of its retail locations (its New York flagship,
on Fifth Avenue, will soon be a Nike megastore); since then, it has been
hobbling along on some buzzy partnerships (a capsule collection with
Vetements) and some not-so-glamorous deals (a diffusion line for
Kohl’s). In 2015, the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, acquired a pepto-pink version of an original Juicy
tracksuit,
seemingly cementing its status as an item of bygone decadence. But now
that the generation of consumers who grew up fantasizing about Fila
slides and Dior saddlebags is finally reaching financial maturity, Juicy
Couture—whose recent Fashion Week collection will be available on
online in mid-April—is attempting a renaissance built on
noughties nostalgia.

It may seem quaint given our current age of athleisure, when companies
from Virgil Abloh’s Off-White to Kanye West’s Yeezy have formed around
the idea of selling five-hundred-dollar sweatpants at Barneys, but when
Juicy first débuted, in the spring of 2001, the idea of a high-end
tracksuit was something of a revelation. Also called “warmups,” owing to
their initial popularity with athletes stretching on the field,
tracksuits had become a leisurewear trend in the seventies; their
descendent, the polyester “shell suits” of the eighties and nineties,
were churned out by big athletic brands like Nike and Adidas. They
became popular with both vanguard hip-hop artists and with the British
working class, embraced by “chav” performers like Sporty Spice and mocked by Sacha Baron Cohen when he played Ali G.
Juicy targeted a different clientele altogether. At eighty dollars for
the pants (low-slung, fitted, with a drawstring waist) and seventy-five
dollars for the top (cropped, zip-up, with the infamous silver “J”
pull), Juicy’s suit was just pricey enough to radiate status, but
attainable enough to become a part of the everyday wardrobes of
thousands of high-school girls (and, as immortalized by Amy Poehler’s
costuming in “Mean Girls,” their mothers, too). Instead of urban
athletics, the brand suggested a certain kind of pampered abandonment.
It was the look of always being cozy on a transcontinental flight, or of
dashing out quickly for orange juice in your parents’ S.U.V. (It is
worth noting that the tracksuit’s zenith collided with the heyday of
Uggs, a pas de deux of clunky-chic, and with the rise of Von Dutch
trucker hats, another garment repurposed from its working-class roots.)

The leading poster girl for this look, the one who epitomized Juicy’s
trashy-chic princess vibe, was, of course, Paris Hilton. Juicy’s
founders, Gela Nash-Taylor and Pam Skaist-Levy (who met as shopgirls in
the bathroom of a high-end boutique on Melrose Avenue, in 1988, and left Juicy Couture after selling it to Liz Claiborne, in 2003, for $53.1 million), were
brilliant and connected marketers of their own product, especially among
celebrities. They hired the powerful publicist Lara Shriftman, who
suggested that they début the suits at a swanky party inside the Chateau
Marmont, where they invited the bold-faced names of the day: Mena
Suvari! Tiffani Thiessen! Jennifer Love Hewitt! Rebecca Romijn! In their
2014 book, “The Glitter Plan: How We Started Juicy Couture for $200
and Turned It Into a Global Brand,”
Nash-Taylor and Skaist-Levy, writing in a Valley Girl royal “we,”
described how, during the company’s early-aughts heyday, a messenger
service would pull up outside the warehouses in Pacoima more than ten
times a day to haul free velour leisurewear across Hollywood. But Hilton was the first celebrity to wear her Juicy two-pieces on the red
carpet, often pairing them with Fendi and Vuitton bags that were worth
ten times the cost of the outfit. Later, she claimed that she owned more
than a thousand Juicy tracksuits during the years of her reality show
“The Simple Life,” when she and her co-star, Nicole Richie (who happens
to be one of Mizrahi’s current clients), brought their socialite
shenanigans to blue-collar America. In 2008, in case its
oblivious-rich-girl association wasn’t already solidified, Juicy
launched a “Let Them Eat Tracksuits” campaign, wrapping its new New York
store in pink ribbons, like a giant present, just as the world was
spiralling into economic crisis.

Juicy embodied the Paris Hilton life style in other ways. Hilton, who
popularized the purse puppy, and who regularly wore a tiara in what she
later called her “Tink-Barbie stage,” seemed to both court and ignore
the debates roiling about her fame. She grinned like a Cheshire cat for
the paparazzi in her hot-pink tracksuits, because she already knew
something that many people did not: that the concept of celebrity in the
digital era was shifting, and that the new aristocracy would be determined
not by talent or tastefulness but by the ability to exploit attention (a
lesson that another hotel dynasty has mastered all too well). If you
wore tight chartreuse pants with “Juicy” bedazzled across the rear, it
didn’t matter if it looked elegant; what mattered was that it was seen.
In Juicy’s original warehouse, the founders wrote in their book, the team kept a “wall of fame,”
featuring images of celebs wearing their outfits to the park or the gym,
and a “wall of shame,” featuring women in “less flattering situations,”
including “Mariah Carey wearing Juicy during her much-publicized nervous
breakdown; publicist Lizzie Grubman, who ran down a crowd outside a club
in the Hamptons, wearing the tracksuit on her way to jail; and Gucci
murderess Patrizia Reggiani, who was convicted of orchestrating the
murder of her ex-husband, Maurizio Gucci, wearing a tracksuit at the
funeral.” Whether or not all of these Juicy moments actually happened
(Reggiani, for instance, appears to have worn Gucci to the
funeral),
they suggest the glee that the founders took in pushing the boundaries
of good taste. “We didn’t care where you were going in the tracksuit,”
Nash-Taylor and Skaist-Levy wrote. “As long as you were going, we were
happy.”

At Mizrahi’s first rooftop presentation at Rockefeller Center, last
fall, Hilton herself made a cameo, wearing a butter-yellow
tracksuit in a modified short-short style, accessorized with a tiny
black Chihuahua. Richie, too, has been seen on Instagram sporting
Juicy nouveau. Still, Mizrahi knows that the brand can’t sail back to
prominence on the strength of nostalgia alone. Juicy may have presaged
the dominance of athleisure, but now it has to play catch-up. The
original tracksuits thrived at a time before the mainstreaming of the
body-positivity movement, and Nash-Taylor and Skaist-Levy proudly used
their own petite frames as sample sizes for the garments, which were
designed to bare just a hint of tanned, toned midriff. In the early
days, they advised their seamstresses to skew small: “If you think they
look like baby clothes, they are the right size.” In the new designs,
the pants have fitted, rather than flared, bottoms (the better to show
off a statement sneaker), and the jacket, with a dropped torso, is no
longer good for displaying a belly-button piercing. A few weeks ago,
Elle Fanning was photographed deplaning at LAX in a baggy new velour
Mizrahi creation the color of a strawberry smoothie. The fabric hung off
her frame like vestments, more “Young Pope” than “Legally Blonde.”

Fanning, I realized, looked relaxed in her Juicy Couture in a way that
the young women who wore the tracksuits in my youth never quite had. I
thought, in particular, of Britney Spears, who wore a periwinkle version
all over town before she shaved her head and traded her Skittles-tinted
wardrobe for an oversized gray sweatshirt in the midst of her own very
public breakdown. Spears, now a thirty-six-year-old mother of two, has
recently reëmerged as the face of the chic Parisian streetwear brand Kenzo,
looking radiant in a boxy emerald sweatshirt cropped to show off the
belly ring that still decorates her abs. The Kenzo collection is
eighties-inspired, a nostalgic throwback to the era when Spears, as a
young girl in small-town Louisiana, “used to wear big bows on top of my
head,” as she recently told Vogue.
In 2016, as a promotional stunt for a Juicy “Black Label” capsule
collection at Bloomingdale’s, Spears agreed to integrate twenty
tracksuits into the virtual world of her “Britney: American Dream”
mobile game. But I imagine that she, like me, has reservations about
reliving the Juicy years in real life, even if the brand’s designs are
no longer intended to overexpose. With hundreds of companies now selling
pendulous joggers and snuggly hoodies, there are plenty of other ways to
disappear into cozy clothes.