Fashion’s Gone Full Jockcore—And Honestly, It Looks Good

Back to flesh, back to form

There is a new body language unfolding on the runways, and this time, it’s less about what clothes are saying and more about what they’re letting the body say for itself. Fashion, having long luxuriated in escapism, swaddled in oversized silhouettes, surrealist drapery, and post-pandemic abstraction, has come back down to earth. And its landing pad? A squat rack.

Welcome to the era of jockcore.

It’s hard to define, and that’s precisely the point. Jockcore isn’t one particular garment or designer so much as a cultural shift; a turn toward garments that suggest the wearer has recently returned from a hike, a football scrimmage, or a Pilates reformer. Or perhaps never left. The body, in all its sweaty immediacy, is the protagonist now. There is no hiding beneath exaggerated tailoring or shapeless wool blankets. Fashion has begun to prioritize visibility over illusion, and visibility means skin.

Take a walk through recent runways and you’ll spot it immediately: at Diesel, tank tops cling to torsos like second skins. At Balenciaga, the sportswear language of compression tops and bike shorts, once considered ironic, is now almost devotional. Willy Chavarria sends models out with heavyweight physiques draped in fabric that only barely qualifies as outerwear. At ERL and Dsquared2, mesh, leather, and neon mimic the afterglow of a rave or a locker room; the sticky and masculine glamour one might associate with high school heroes or gym cults.

The body as message

This is not about athleticwear per se. It’s about what athleticwear suggests: dedication, discipline, the performance of masculinity, and, paradoxically, its vulnerability. The aesthetic nods to sport, sure, but also to the fantasy of embodiment. As the margins of health, vanity, and virility blur, the body becomes both canvas and message. In jockcore, to reveal is to assert.

We might wonder, though: have we come full circle to fashion’s dark preoccupation with physical idealism? The re-emergence of torso-forward design and abbreviated hemlines prompts difficult questions. Has body neutrality been benched? Are we witnessing the stealth return of the impossible physique; washboard abs as gatekeeper, not accessory?

Unlike the soft-focus wellness of “clean girl” minimalism or the performative leisure of “quiet luxury,” jockcore is neither aspirational nor passive. It is aggressive and sweaty. There is no fantasy here, no cottagecore mist or sci-fi cosplay. The escapism that flourished in fashion during the years of lockdown and cultural malaise has burned off. In its place: reality. Or at least a more sculpted version of it.

That reality is shaped, quite literally, by lifestyle. The gym is no longer a neutral place of health but a cultural totem, a site of self-styling and surveillance. To be fit is to be fashionable. But more than that, to look fit is to broadcast fluency in a new aesthetic economy, one where muscle is as much a social signal as a sartorial one.

Flex as fashion

Still, jockcore is not without irony. For all its brute-force gestures, sweat, straps, and the glisten of skin, it is, at its core, deeply stylized. No one actually wears an ERL rugby-esque gear to your local gym. The references may come from locker rooms and weight benches, but the audience is the street, the club, the runway. It’s a performance of effort and exertion, even if the most rigorous thing involved is a fitting.

In that sense, jockcore feels like the natural evolution of our collective exhaustion with disembodiment. After years of avatars, filters, and garments that treated the body as an inconvenience, we are back to dressing for the body. Or, more accurately, around it. The garments are now punctuation marks, the torso the sentence. The body is once again the locus of fashion’s fantasy, but this time, it’s flexing.

Whether that fantasy liberates or burdens is still up for debate. What’s clear is that fashion has re-entered its corporeal era. And for better or worse, the era has a gym membership.

Photos courtesy ERL, DSQUARED2, Willy Chavarria