The dress is dead, the pant is dead, the jacket is dead, long live the new sportswear

This Times Style piece covers the news that "the dress" "is dead."  As usual, no concrete reason is given -- apparently, “the eye is looking for something new, and so is the psyche."  Whatever.  I think all these old categories -- "the dress"; "the pant" -- are outdated, and that it's the entire dizzying, lucrative dance of separates that consumers, their eyes, and their psyches are sick of.

So, my big, long-range prediction is that old separates categories, which have been eroding, are going to finally wash away, and in their place more total-look, perhaps one-piece, minimalist, body-con-influenced outfits will come into fashion.  And as has been the way this happens since always, the new look will come out of sportswear -- actual sportswear, like you wear to play sports in.  The modern equivalent of what the stuff we call "sportswear" now used to be.

This trend has begun with the interest in dancewear and the "superhero" look.  It could continue with a revolution in material.  Comfortable, high-performance, eco-friendly, temperature-control, sweat-wicking fabric will finally cease to exist exclusively in the realm of exercise clothes and move into regular casual and formal clothes.  Design features of activewear, such as protective padding, zip-in-zip-out coordinating garments, etc., could then follow.

A really modern men's suit, for example, would be a form-fitting garment made of high-tech fabric worn over some kind of  body-shaping or -enhancing "armor."  Very Japanese, very superhero, very Aeon Flux.  Very Clockwork Orange.  Very environmentally-friendly, inexpensive, no-fuss, tough, modern.

A really modern women's outfit would, indeed, include some kind of leg covering.  (It's the extraneous fabric and modesty-related inconvenience of dresses and skirts that really makes them old-fashioned.) It would be basically along the same lines as the above-imagined men's garment, only cut to flatter a woman's body.

Update 5/6/08: Madonna may have chosen sportswear as her new look.  Her clothes in the video for 4 Minutes are a perfect example of New Sportswear.

Update 7/4/08: If even Free People is making corset-influenced clothes, something must be going on.