Aastha Rattha recalls feeling a sense of gratitude washing over her when she saw Alia Bhatt in one of her rib-layered bra tanks for a promotional shoot of her recent action feature Alpha. It wasn’t just rewarding to see her activewear brand, Pace Active, get visibility — the feeling came with a mild revelation. “Celebrities today have access to the very best labels in the world. If they choose to wear an Indian brand, it’s because the product stands on its own merit,” Rattha says.
Pace Active is one of India’s many homegrown brands making a serious dent in the athleisure and activewear market in the country, which is projected to exhibit a compound annual growth rate of 10 per cent between 2025 and 2035, according to Market Research Future.
The stats are hardly surprising.
Made For India
While brands such as Lululemon, Alo Yoga and Vuori have increasingly shaped the premium activewear category globally, homegrown brands have caught not only the eye of the general masses, but also celebrities, who are looking to bridge gaps in sizing and accessibility.
Akshay Khubchandani, founder of activewear brand Bird Eye, looks at the decline of international luxury sportswear in India as changing winds. “I know for a matter of fact that Lululemon and Alo Yoga are down to 0.001 per cent of the market share in India because of the price point. I don’t even see Lululemon and Alo as competitors because you’ll probably buy them when you travel — sometimes you’re not okay to pay ₹15,000 for a pair of leggings.”
Harshita Motaparthi, co-founder of Mile Collective alongside actress Samantha Ruth Prabhu, wanted an affordable but befitting alternative in this space, made for Indian bodies and climates.
“I started working out very young, when I was exposed to a lot of international brands, and every time I got the chance to travel, or someone was coming to India, I would just buy things in bulk, which was not a very sustainable option,” she says.
As she started researching her options, she felt that fabric could be a big differentiator. “With a lot of these international brands, the fabric was too thick and non-breathable for India, because it’s predominantly hot here,” she says.
Wellness Is Wearable
Insiders point to the Covid-19 pandemic as the formative turning point for the boom in the country. But over the years, activewear sensibilities transitioned from something people wear just to the gym to a full-blown aspirational wellness aesthetic.
“It just goes with everything, whether it’s a coffee run, matcha, Pilates, or whatever’s happening in Mumbai or other cities,” says Khubchandani, adding that with a significant share of Gen Z embracing sobriety-curious habits, drinking less, and adopting a more wellness-forward lifestyle, athleisure has emerged as the perfect space to explore.
“Leggings as a product drive around 70 to 75 per cent of our business. People are also looking at athleisure as a lifestyle product now. Leggings can be worn to work out, run errands, to travel,” says Motaparthi, adding that they make fits for someone who trains strength and someone who just wants to throw something on for errands.
Star Power
A big part of this is also the increasingly interconnected nature of celebrity culture. Motaparthi points to a coffee bean shade Mile Collective hadn’t yet launched on its website — Prabhu happened to wear it to the gym and was photographed. “That entire day, we had old customers and new people send us that video saying, ‘I want this exact colour right now.’
There’s definitely a big correlation between what influencers and celebrities are wearing and what people really want.”
The relationship runs deeper than visibility. When Motaparthi sent Prabhu five or six sports bras to test, weeks passed before she heard back — only to learn Prabhu had quietly put each one through 15 to 20 wash cycles and documented exactly how they’d held up. “That was the level of detail she got into,” says Motaparthi.
Clean Sweat
Yama Yoga, a sustainable activewear brand in India, is leaning into wellness as lifestyle. Its Aeroyama range uses a blend of TENCEL modal, a plant-derived fibre made from beechwood trees. Founder Sushant Sukhija looks at wellness and fitness as the new flexes. “People are spending more on good food and fitness, to things like HYROX and wellness retreats. I’m not just talking about India, but globally too because of Instagram. Trends commute and influence very quickly,” he notes.
He says his brand was born to be a differentiator in fabric. “If we produce synthetics, we use only recycled ones so that we will be a part of the circular economy and not just try to create more waste,” he says, pointing to the forever-chemicals reckoning the industry faces in the West.
Certain activewear brands have recently come under fire for trace amounts of PFAS — forever chemicals linked to various adverse health conditions — used to help fabrics wick sweat. “I have absolute clarity that these forever chemicals will be disallowed at some point. Now it’s just about us understanding how to educate the customer that it is not important to really have a sweat-wicking T-shirt,” he says.
Sukhija believes the definition of celebrity itself has expanded with the rise of the Instagram generation. “I would say somebody nailing HYROX is also a celebrity, and people will follow them for their journey of fitness... so they’re a celebrity in their own way.”
For Rattha, the idea is to create products that become part of people’s capsule wardrobes. “We’d much rather create a customer who wears Pace three or four times a week because it’s become her favourite outfit than rely purely on celebrity moments. At the end of the day, the product always wins. If you build something people genuinely love wearing, they’ll become your biggest ambassadors.”