Are Lululemon’s Leggings Getting Smaller?

A specter is haunting Lululemon shoppers—the specter of tiny leggings. At least that’s what among the brand’s adult customers appear to imagine. A thread on the r/lululemon subreddit from March, bluntly titled “Has their clothing shrunk or am I just getting fatter lol,” garnered a whole lot of comments from people convinced that something concerning the garments has modified.

“Boy am I relieved to see it’s not only me that noticed this!” one Redditor wrote in response. “I’ve been buying a 4 in Aligns and 6 in bras/tanks eternally. Now I’m a 6 in Aligns and an 8 or 10 in bras and tanks. The Align shorts just don’t fit the identical anymore even after they’re not double lined. They needed to have modified the material or something.”

“Not just you!!!!!” one other said. “It’s seriously messing with my head. This is relieving to read. I’ve lost a good amount of weight and figured I used to be able to size down in Wunder Trains since mine are falling down on me. Nope.”

Others chimed in that although they’d stayed the identical size in other clothing, remained the identical weight, and even gone down in regular pants sizes, the number on their Lululemon garments continued to rise.

One woman who responded to the Reddit thread, Stella, tells SELF she’s been shopping at Lululemon since she was 13 years old. Now 28, she says she owns around 35 articles of Lulu clothing, mostly leggings, tops, and shorts—but said she noticed a change within the brand’s garments over the past 6 to 10 years, with an excellent shift since 2020. “I find the sizing discrepancies without delay are major between different legging models,” she says. “A 6 in Align might be a 14 in one other legging. The disparity makes me feel frustrated—it’s much harder to buy at Lululemon now than it was before the pandemic.”

Maddie Ball, a 29-year-old living in San Francisco, tells SELF one other sizing issue showed up for her in an excellent less predictable way when she tried to resell a pair of the Wunder Under high-rise leggings on Poshmark in September 2023. “The buyer thought they were ,” she tells SELF.

I reviewed screenshots of the unhappy customer’s grievance, and…whew: “These ‘size 6’ leggings is not going to even go past my knee they’re so small,” the person wrote. “Also as you possibly can see in the image the feel of the leggings is grainy, I even have a pair of size 6 Lululemon leggings that I purchased from Lululemon which is made out of buttery soft materials with no texture.” Ball says she suspects the leggings her dissatisfied buyer owned were from a special line of Lulu clothing than those she was selling. Still, she says she ultimately canceled the transaction because, in fairness, “this pair did seem especially small.”

On that note, Stella also says she feels that the standard of Lulu’s activewear has modified for the more serious. “I own shorts, tops, leggings, headbands, purses, yoga mats, multiple other varieties of accessories, and I feel the standard for the clothing pieces themselves, especially the leggings, has modified to the intense,” she says. “My first pair of leggings, purchased over 15 years ago, are still in mint condition with nothing improper with them despite YEARS of use. Lulu lately simply cannot compare.”