Athleisure Soft Power Dressing Is Reshaping Spring 2026 Workwear Trends

Sweatpants now come pleated. Wool trousers are no longer buttoned into but fastened by drawstrings. If those two sentences read as a contradiction in terms, that is precisely the point. The most quietly subversive story in Spring 2026 workwear is not about a color or a hem length. It is a structural one: a design migration where tailoring borrows loungewear construction and loungewear adopts tailoring cues, a phenomenon that Highsnobiety has named, with sharp economy, "soft power dressing."

It is, as the framing makes clear, "inconspicuous at first glance." You might walk past it in the office and not register the tell. The pleats on those sweatpants look almost formal. The drawstring waist on that fine wool trouser could pass for a subtle design detail. That is what makes soft power dressing genuinely interesting as a trend: its teeth are hidden.

What Soft Power Dressing Actually Is

Before anything else, a clarification. This is not the various iterations of Lululemon for the even-richer, and it is not simply the broad generational drift from formal to casual that the fashion industry has narrated for the last decade. Nor is it the consumer habit of guerrilla-repurposing TEKLA or Schostal pajama halves or Charvet-like house slippers for regular outfits, however charming that practice might be.

Soft power dressing is something more considered: the tension between casual and formalwear, reinterpreting traditional elegance with unexpected twists. In its Highsnobiety framing, "this current mutation of athleisure is as much a matter of soft, sporty sets as it is of separate, conventionally-at-odds designs put together." The result is a wardrobe logic that refuses easy categorization. In 2026, tailoring is increasingly built like loungewear, and loungewear is increasingly cut like tailoring. Both statements are simultaneously true.

The Runway Evidence

The clearest demonstration of soft power dressing at the high-fashion level arrived at Dries Van Noten, where the collection went, in Highsnobiety's words, "full business up top and slumber party down below." Colorful ties, deep V-necks, and double-breasted jackets were paired with ribbed-knit, elastic-cuffed bottoms, creating looks in which the formality of the upper half seemed blissfully unaware of what was happening below the waist. Klausner shaped each look through tension, balancing sharp tailoring with ease, offsetting precise seams with unruly finishes. Formal codes remained, but they arrived bent. Jackets stretched across the torso but broke softly at the waist. Drawstring shorts replaced trousers under tuxedo jackets. The show, titled "Just a Perfect Day," staged at Paris Fashion Week, was not merely eccentric formalism. It was a rigorous argument for the kind of dressing that takes the office and the sofa equally seriously.

Over at Hermès, Veronique Nichanian's final collection for the house's men's line made the case even more quietly. Highsnobiety described "a cruelly cozy-looking ensemble of pinstriped, fuzzy wool that neatly blended in with the severe suits and high-collared leathers also shown." The operative word is "blended." The pinstriped fuzzy wool ensemble did not announce itself as different from the tailored looks surrounding it. It occupied the same visual register, trading the stiffness of construction for the warmth of texture, all while maintaining the silhouette grammar of formal menswear. In a collection defined by severity, softness was the quietly radical gesture.

Calvin Klein, meanwhile, committed most overtly to the hybrid logic, sending out a "teasing trench-covered onesie" alongside a "bathrobe-resembling wrap-coat." The trench, the most convention-bound of outerwear archetypes, used here to cover a onesie, the most domestically coded of garments. The wrap-coat reads as something you'd reach for on a Sunday morning, rendered in a fabric and silhouette that would read as entirely credible in a boardroom lobby.

The Grammar of the New Garment

At the level of individual pieces, soft power dressing produces a specific and identifiable set of design choices:

• Sweatpants with pleating, which introduces the constructional vocabulary of formal trousers into fabric typically associated with the couch
• Wool trousers fastened by drawstrings rather than traditional button closures, borrowing elastic-waist ease from loungewear without abandoning the material weight of suiting
• Ribbed-knit, elastic-cuffed bottoms worn under double-breasted jackets, mixing athletic and formal construction on the same body
• Bathrobe-like wrap-coats and trench-covered onesies, where outerwear categories dissolve into each other
• The quarter-zip silhouette, once the slim-fitted signature of what Highsnobiety calls "the preppy venture capitalists' favorite," turning "frumpier and comfier by the minute, more home-office hoodie than Hamptons"

That last detail is particularly telling. The quarter-zip's cultural trajectory from prep totem to home-office staple maps almost exactly onto the broader shift soft power dressing describes. The silhouette did not change drastically; the proportions softened, the fit relaxed, the context expanded. The garment migrated.

The Japanese Label Middle Ground

Between the runway heights of Hermès and the consumer habit of pajama repurposing lies a third category, and it may be the most wearable expression of soft power dressing for most people. A cluster of Japanese and niche labels including A. PRESSE, Ssstein, and FreshService have built their entire aesthetic around what Highsnobiety describes as "tailored, oversized hybrids": "big boxy blazers atop baggy waistband slacks, shirts tucked in nonchalantly, loafers on-foot."

The Highsnobiety framing describes these as "codes plucked from conservative menswear, dusted and repackaged, certain to appeal to a pandemic-spurred preoccupation with versatile, couch-to-conference-room styles." The loafer is the crucial finishing note here. It is an accessory that carries inherent formality (leather, a closed silhouette, heritage associations) while simultaneously signaling ease. Worn with a boxy blazer and a baggy waistband slack, it anchors the whole composition in something legible and professional without requiring a single stiff seam.

Why This Moment, Why This Trend

The pandemic logic embedded in soft power dressing is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as context. The "couch-to-conference-room" demand that emerged after 2020 never fully resolved. Hybrid working did not produce a wardrobe consensus. Instead, it produced a persistent tension: how do you dress with authority when your morning may involve a video call and your afternoon a subway commute and your evening a friend's dinner? The answer the market found was not the logo-stitched tracksuit and not the sharp suit. It was something in between, something built like the former and cut like the latter.

As one trend forecaster put it, "a new wave of sporty dressing emerges that blends athletic functionality with everyday dressing," noting that "what started with the Adidas track pants trend has grown into a demand for fashion that feels sporty outside the gym or the usual contexts." Soft power dressing is the high-fashion articulation of that demand: not sport as costume, not tailoring as performance, but a genuine fusion at the level of construction.

What separates the Highsnobiety analysis from trend-cycle noise is its insistence on specificity. This is not a vibe. It is a set of precise design decisions visible in the stitching, the waistband, the cuff, the collar. The Dries Van Noten Mid-rise straight pants available via mytheresa at $715 and the Saint Laurent Le Loafer leather mules at $1,200 on the same retailer represent two poles of the soft power proposition: trousers engineered at the intersection of ease and formality, anchored by footwear that signals exactly the same duality. The Arc'teryx Beta Jacket at $400 sits at the technical-outerwear edge of the same conversation, a piece whose performance construction has been absorbed into the broader wardrobe without apology.

The real signal is not any single price point or brand. It is the design logic beneath all of them. Tailoring built like loungewear. Loungewear cut like tailoring. When the categories themselves stop being opposites, the wardrobe stops being a daily negotiation and starts being, finally, something that simply works.