Move Over, Athleisure. Lounge Luxe Is the New Way We Want to Dress

There’s a new comfort movement taking over from athleisure, and we’re calling it Lounge Luxe. We all remember the athleisure craze, actually, who are we kidding, some of us are still very much living in it. There was a glorious moment when society collectively decided leggings, sneakers and an oversized sweatshirt constituted an outfit. Suddenly, you could do the school run looking as though you were moments away from an intense reformer Pilates class, despite the fact your only scheduled exercise for the day was carrying six grocery bags from the car in one trip.

And we embraced it enthusiastically. Leggings went from gym wear to coffee wear, supermarket wear, airport wear, working-from-home wear and eventually, “I have absolutely no intention of exercising today but nobody needs to know that” wear. Athleisure changed women’s wardrobes because it proved something we probably should have realised much earlier: we really, really like being comfortable.

The problem was that comfort became almost synonymous with looking sporty. If you wanted stretch, softness and clothes you could actually move through your day in, apparently you also needed to look vaguely prepared to break into a squat. But we think comfortable dressing is entering its next phase, and here at Parenthood360, we’re calling it Lounge Luxe.

Think all the glorious ease of clothes you could happily curl up on the sofa in, elevated through luxe-feeling fabrics, clever silhouettes, beautiful draping and unexpected details. Instead of looking like you’re dressed for a Netflix marathon, you can walk out the front door looking like you have somewhere considerably more fabulous to be.

And Australian fashion label Motto Fashions is giving us a very good reason to believe this might just be the next evolution of comfortable dressing.

Comfort, But Make It Fabulous

If athleisure took gym clothes out of the gym, Lounge Luxe takes the comfort of home and makes it fabulous enough for everywhere else. That’s an important distinction, particularly for women whose days rarely involve staying in one place. An outfit might need to survive school drop-off, work, a coffee meeting, the supermarket, school pick-up, sitting on the sidelines of someone’s sport and then, if the stars align, an impromptu drink with a friend.

We don’t necessarily want to dress up for every part of that day, but equally there are days when pulling on another pair of black leggings makes you feel decidedly less like the sophisticated woman you once imagined you’d become and more like someone who has been wearing the same uniform since 2019. Lounge Luxe sits beautifully in the middle.

Think soft, forgiving fabrics that move with you but are cut into shapes that feel deliberate. Relaxed silhouettes that don’t cling to every part of your body but still have structure and personality. Pieces that work with sneakers at 9am but can take a boot, statement earring or fabulous jacket at 6pm. You get the comfort without necessarily looking like comfort was the only consideration when you got dressed.

Motto Has Been Quietly Building the Wardrobe for It

What makes Motto particularly interesting in this conversation is that comfort isn’t something the Melbourne-born brand has suddenly discovered because relaxed dressing is having a moment. Founded by husband-and-wife team John and Faye Browne in 1985 and now led by their daughter Lauren French, Motto has built its identity around dressing real women rather than asking women to reshape themselves around fashion.

Its pieces tend to skim rather than constrict, play with proportion, colour and print, and offer the kind of styling versatility that becomes increasingly valuable when you want your wardrobe to work harder. The brand also produces its collections in limited runs, with an emphasis on individuality rather than simply following whatever trend happens to be dominating the season.

And women have responded. According to Motto, more than 50,000 pairs of its Miracle Pant have been sold, while its Blogger Shirt has remained its number-one-selling garment for seven consecutive years, with more than 55,000 sold. The reversible Lust Cami, complete with removable shoulder pads, reportedly sold out within three hours of its first release.

These aren’t pieces succeeding because women have suddenly stopped caring about style. Quite the opposite. Perhaps women are becoming increasingly unwilling to accept the old idea that looking fabulous requires being uncomfortable.

We’ve Done Our Time in Clothes That Hurt

There comes a stage in life when your tolerance for fashion-related suffering begins to diminish. We’ve stood in heels that made our toes lose circulation, worn jeans that required lying horizontally across a bed to do up and spent entire dinners discreetly wishing we could undo a waistband. We’ve bought things because they looked incredible while standing perfectly still in a changing room, only to discover they were completely incompatible with sitting, eating, bending over or participating in normal human life.

Then motherhood adds another layer. Suddenly you’re crouching to tie shoelaces, carrying bags, bending over prams, sitting cross-legged on floors, racing between commitments and discovering that children have an uncanny ability to need you to physically retrieve something at the exact moment you’ve worn an outfit that doesn’t allow your knees to bend.

Comfort stops feeling like giving up and starts feeling extremely sensible. But sensible doesn’t have to mean boring, and that’s where the idea of Lounge Luxe becomes interesting. It isn’t about hiding in oversized clothes or abandoning fashion. It’s about demanding more from it.

We want comfort and personality, ease and polish, and clothes we can actually live in while still catching ourselves in a shop window and thinking we look pretty fabulous today. Surely that isn’t too much to ask.

Perhaps This Is Part of a Bigger Fashion Shift

There is another reason Motto feels particularly relevant right now. The brand recently launched its provocatively named F*ck It Era campaign, encouraging women to ditch the rules about what they’re supposedly meant to wear and dress according to how they actually want to feel.

“Fashion isn’t about chasing youth,” says Motto owner Lauren French. “It’s about owning your style and being visible on your own terms.”

Perhaps Lounge Luxe belongs within that same conversation. There has traditionally been something slightly loaded about women choosing comfort. We’re told not to “let ourselves go”, while simultaneously being encouraged to dress for our age, our shape, our lifestyle, our body type and whichever arbitrary fashion rule happens to be circulating this week.

What if getting dressed became less about following those rules and more about asking how you actually want to feel that day? Comfortable doesn’t have to mean invisible, relaxed doesn’t have to mean sloppy, and sophisticated certainly doesn’t have to mean uncomfortable. There is a rather lovely freedom in clothes that allow all three ideas to coexist.

Sorry Leggings, We’re Not Breaking Up With You

Nobody needs to ceremoniously remove their leggings from the wardrobe. That would be ridiculous because we’ve been through far too much together. They saw us through lockdowns, school runs, long-haul flights, Saturday sport, working from home and approximately 4,000 occasions when we claimed we might exercise later. They deserve our respect and, frankly, probably a permanent place in the wardrobe.

But perhaps they’re finally getting some competition. If the next era of fashion allows us to retain everything we loved about athleisure while swapping the permanently-ready-for-Pilates aesthetic for beautiful fabrics, fabulous silhouettes and clothes that make us feel genuinely put together, we’re ready for it.

Athleisure taught us that women weren’t willing to sacrifice comfort anymore. Lounge Luxe simply asks why we should have to sacrifice style for it either. If we can curl up on the sofa feeling completely comfortable, realise we’re running late, add a fabulous shoe and some earrings and walk straight out the door looking like a million dollars, we’d call that progress.

Explore Motto Fashions online, with pieces ranging from around $50 to over $200.

Parenthood360 note: This article was inspired by information supplied by Motto Fashions. As always, our editorial opinions and trend observations are our own.