Alo, Nike, Adidas, Lululemon and the rest 2026 — an activewear brand review judged on textiles, not campaigns

What it claims

• Alo Yoga — 'buttery soft', 'studio to street', Airbrush and Airlift as premium wellness fabric
• Nike — Dri-FIT 'moves sweat away from your skin', Move to Zero sustainability, recycled polyester across the line
• Adidas — Aeroready and Heat.Rdy 'keep you dry', Primegreen/Primeblue 'made with recycled ocean plastic', 'end plastic waste'
• Lululemon — Nulu, Luon, Everywhere Belt Bag halo; 'engineered sensation', Science of Feel, 'buttery-soft, second-skin'
• Gymshark / Vuori / Athleta / Sweaty Betty — 'sweat-wicking', 'four-way stretch', 'sustainably sourced', 'squat-proof'
• Under Armour — HeatGear/ColdGear 'temperature control', anti-odour technology built into the fabric
• On / Patagonia / Tracksmith — performance engineering, natural-fibre blends, repair-and-reuse programmes

What the label is not telling you

• The trade name is not a fibre. Dri-FIT is a polyester knit construction. Aeroready is a polyester or poly-elastane knit with a moisture finish. Nulu is nylon plus Lycra. Luon is nylon plus Lycra at a different gauge. DreamKnit, Airlift, Airbrush, HeatGear, Everyday Soft Duo — all of them are knit-and-finish engineering of polyester, nylon and elastane. Reading the composition tag rather than the technology name collapses the entire premium hierarchy of this category: a €118 legging and a €28 legging are frequently 75/25 nylon-elastane and 78/22 nylon-elastane respectively, differing in knit density, dye quality, panel construction and pattern-making — real things worth paying for — but not in what polymer is touching skin.
• Elastane is the ingredient nobody names, and it is in nearly all of it. Stretch and recovery come from 12–28% elastane (Lycra/spandex), a polyurethane. It cannot currently be recycled at scale, it is what makes a garment un-recyclable even when the other 80% is 'recycled polyester', it degrades with heat and chlorine, and it is the fraction most implicated in the sticky, permanent odour that appears in high-elastane leggings after a year. The higher the 'squat-proof, second-skin, compressive' claim, the higher the elastane. Alo's Airlift, Lululemon's Wunder-family and most Gymshark sculpt lines sit at the top of that range.
• Recycled polyester (rPET) is a bottle story, not a body story. Nike's Move to Zero and Adidas's Primegreen/Primeblue are real supply-chain achievements and worth crediting on carbon and waste. They do not change the dermal question. Some 2024 work finds bisphenol levels higher in recycled-polyester textiles than in virgin, because the recycled feedstock carries contaminants forward. rPET also sheds microfibres at broadly the same rate as virgin polyester. If your reason for buying is the ocean, this is a genuine improvement. If your reason is your skin, it changes nothing.
• Bisphenols in sports bras and leggings are the most under-reported finding in this category. The Center for Environmental Health's testing programme found BPA in polyester-based sports bras and athletic shirts from multiple major brands at levels that triggered California Prop 65 notices, and follow-up work confirms migration increases with the exact conditions of a workout: heat, sweat, friction, occlusion. Sports bras and compressive leggings are the worst-case garment — the highest polyester content, the tightest skin contact, the longest wear, the most sweat. If you change one thing in a wardrobe, change that layer first.
• 'Antimicrobial' and 'anti-odour' are usually a finish, not the fibre. Under Armour's anti-odour, and equivalents across the mid-market, are typically silver-based or other biocidal finishes applied to the fabric. They wash out over the garment's life, they add a biocide to your wastewater, and they are solving a problem that polyester creates in the first place — the bacterial adhesion profile of a hydrophobic synthetic filament. Merino does the same job structurally with no finish at all. A finish that fades after thirty washes is a consumable being sold as a technology.
• PFAS have receded but not disappeared. Durable water repellency on shells, running jackets and some 'weather-resistant' training kit was historically PFAS-based. Nike, Adidas, Patagonia and others have published PFAS-elimination commitments and Patagonia has largely completed the transition, but 2024–2025 third-party testing still finds fluorinated compounds in outdoor and performance outerwear across the market. This lives in shells and outer layers, not in your leggings — but it is worth asking the brand directly when buying a jacket, and worth crediting the brands that publish the answer.
• Alo Yoga is a design-and-marketing business with a mid-market composition tag. The Airbrush and Airlift fabrics are well-engineered nylon-elastane and polyester-elastane knits with excellent hand-feel and pattern-making. That is the product. The wellness positioning — the studio, the aesthetic, the language of alignment — is doing work that the material composition does not support. Priced against Gymshark, the difference you are buying is fit, finish and brand, not fibre.
• Lululemon publishes more than most, and still hasn't solved the same problem. The Science of Feel work is real materials engineering and the fit standards genuinely lead the category. But Nulu and Luon are nylon-Lycra, and the brand's own transparency reporting shows a portfolio still overwhelmingly synthetic. Credit the disclosure; don't confuse it with a different material outcome.
• Patagonia, Tracksmith and On are the transparency outliers, for different reasons. Patagonia publishes material composition, supply chain and repair data more completely than anyone else at scale, has moved furthest on PFAS, and runs the most credible repair-and-resale programme — its synthetic kit is still synthetic, but you can check every claim. Tracksmith uses merino and natural-fibre blends in a meaningful share of the running line, which is the only structural answer to the next-to-skin question in a mainstream brand. On sits in between: strong engineering, growing natural-fibre work, moderate disclosure.
• Nobody in the mainstream sells you the honest fix, because it isn't a garment — it's a laundry habit. Microfibre shed drops substantially with a filter bag or in-machine filter, a colder wash, a fuller drum and less tumble drying. Fabric softener on synthetic activewear is actively counterproductive: it deposits a hydrophobic quat film on exactly the fibre engineered to wick, which is why old leggings stop working and start smelling. See our laundry review for the full chemistry.

Effect on the nervous system

Three inputs, all continuous, none dramatic. Thermal: a garment that holds liquid sweat against skin produces a fast evaporative-cooling drop after effort stops, which a warm system reads as an abrupt thermal challenge — the reason a soaked synthetic base layer feels colder than the air. Well-engineered polyester manages this better than cheap polyester, and merino or Tencel manages it better still, because moisture leaves as vapour from inside the fibre rather than sitting as liquid on the surface. Mechanical: C-tactile afferents read texture, seam pressure and breathability continuously (McGlone 2014; Craig 2002 — the same interoceptive-skin work our anchors run on), and a hot, compressive, damp synthetic in a friction zone is a low-grade signal your system spends the session filtering. This is where the premium brands genuinely earn money — flatlock seams, gusseted panels and better pattern-making measurably reduce that input, and Lululemon and Alo are good at it. Chemical: sweat, heat, occlusion and friction are the exact conditions that raise dermal absorption from a polymer, and a sports bra or compression legging is the highest-exposure garment most people own. None of these are acute effects and nobody should panic-bin a wardrobe. The reasonable read is that the next-to-skin, high-sweat, high-hours layer is worth choosing on composition rather than campaign, and the outer layers can stay whatever they are.

Who it might suit

Buy Nike and Adidas for what they are actually best at — running, court and field kit where liquid-sweat management, engineered fit and price-per-wear genuinely matter, and where their recycled-content programmes are the most substantiated in the mass market. Buy Lululemon and Alo if fit, pattern-making, seam engineering and how the garment sits on your body are what you want, and you are clear that you are paying for construction rather than fibre. Buy Gymshark and Athleta as the value-per-fit tier of the same chemistry. Buy Vuori and Sweaty Betty for the everyday-into-training use case they design for. Buy Patagonia when you want to be able to verify what you are wearing and repair it for a decade. Buy Tracksmith and the merino side of On when you want a mainstream brand that will actually sell you a natural next-to-skin layer.

Who should skip it

Anyone buying premium activewear expecting a premium material — across this shelf you are buying knit engineering, fit and brand, and the composition tag is broadly the same from €28 to €130. Anyone treating 'made from recycled plastic bottles' as a skin-safety claim; it is a waste claim. Anyone with reactive skin, eczema, folliculitis or persistent friction irritation who is training daily in high-elastane compressive synthetics and hasn't yet tried a merino or Tencel next-to-skin layer. Anyone buying an 'anti-odour' garment as a permanent feature — the finish is a consumable. Anyone laundering technical kit with fabric softener or dryer sheets, which quietly destroys the one property they paid for.

Bottom line

Honest ranking for 2026, judged on textiles rather than campaigns: (1) Patagonia — most verifiable composition and supply-chain disclosure, furthest along on PFAS, best repair programme; still synthetic, but checkable. (2) Tracksmith — real merino and natural-fibre content in a mainstream running line, which is the only structural answer to the next-to-skin question here. (3) On — strong engineering, growing natural-fibre work, moderate disclosure. (4) Nike and (5) Adidas — best-in-class performance engineering and the most substantiated recycled-content programmes in the mass market; Dri-FIT and Aeroready are polyester knits doing polyester's job well, and the sustainability story is about carbon, not skin. (6) Lululemon — category-leading fit and seam engineering, above-average disclosure, nylon-Lycra fibre reality. (7) Vuori, (8) Athleta, (9) Sweaty Betty — competent mid-premium versions of the same recipe. (10) Alo Yoga — excellent hand-feel and pattern-making sold at a wellness premium the composition tag does not support. (11) Gymshark — the same chemistry at the honest price. (12) Under Armour — solid performance kit, but the anti-odour finish is a consumable sold as a technology. The practical move is not a wardrobe purge: change the sports bra and the base layer first (highest sweat, tightest contact, longest hours), keep your outer layers, wash cold in a filter bag, and delete fabric softener from technical kit entirely — the detail is in our laundry review. For what to move to, the natural textiles for training review ranks merino, Tencel, hemp and the mycelium hype. Track skin, thermal comfort and post-session recovery through the swap in a Kokorology Journal; the Skin & Beauty Anchor covers the interoceptive-skin frame and the Cortisol Anchor covers the post-effort thermal load the fabric is buffering.