Nike crashes Paris Couture Week to unveil new era for womenswear

The 40-minute performance choreographed by Parris Goebel was the latest effort by Nike to position its women’s business for growth.

By Lucy Maguire

July 7, 2023

Photo: Nike

At the height of couture week, Nike entered the conversation. The sportswear giant took to Paris’s Accor Arena to present ‘Goddess Awakened’, a 40-minute dance performance choreographed by Parris Goebel that featured hula, contemporary dance, vogueing, twerking, breakdancing and an energetic, performative sprint on Nike treadmills.

The event encapsulated Nike’s big investment into womenswear and the company’s new vision for the category. Dancers wore a mix of Nike performance wear, fashion-led sportswear and recent collaborations from Martine Rose, Jacquemus, Feng Chen Wang and Ambush. The timing and location – during Paris Couture Week – were intentional, to align Nike with fashion and also the Olympics, taking place in the city next year.

“Nike is making its biggest investment in women yet as we expand sport for a new generation,” says Amy Montagne, Nike vice president and GM of women’s. This includes product innovation and new retail concepts, plus investing in women athletes and marketing, like Wednesday’s high-production show, to harness the opportunity in outfitting women for holistic fitness, rather than traditional sports.

Seventeenyearold breakdancing champion India Sardjoe was the first person to qualify for breakdancing at the 2024... Seventeen-year-old breakdancing champion India Sardjoe was the first person to qualify for breakdancing at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.Photo: Nike

“We are listening and meeting more women where they are to include all bodies and all forms of movement,” Montagne adds. “‘Goddess Awakened’ signals this next era of Nike Women with our commitment to making a place where everyone feels seen and included. The performance tells a story through dance inviting all to celebrate the joy of movement, community, and creativity.”

After dominating the men’s sportswear market, some analysts suggest Nike has taken too long to properly serve the women’s customer, losing ground to players like Lululemon or Alo Yoga, which have always been positioned as women-first fitness labels. The women’s business is the sports industry’s greatest failure and its greatest opportunity, says Circana (formerly NPD) sports advisor Matt Powell, and as brands continue to race to outfit women throughout their day, Nike is investing big to compete.

Nike reported revenues of $51.2 billion in 2023, up 10 per cent on the previous year. Its women’s business is already substantial (over $10 billion) but there is opportunity for it to get much bigger, says Jay Sole, managing director at UBS. “The key is the women’s apparel market. Women’s apparel is an almost $1 trillion market globally. Nike [currently] has less than 1 per cent market share.” Nike has been working on capitalising on the women’s market for years, but with its latest efforts in product innovation, holistic fitness and the Paris show, the results are evident, Sole says. “This very well could lead to market share gains in the women’s category.”

Goebel, who choreographed Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty fashion shows and Super Bowl performance, has been working on the project for three and a half months, after Nike approached her to help them change the way the world sees women in sport. “Nike gave me the freedom to be creative and come up with a way to share our stories as women,” she said backstage after the show.

Shifting from sport to holistic fitness

The female athletes within the show represented resilience and grit, each with unique backstories that played out on video screens before or during their performances. Seventeen-year-old breakdancer India Sardjoe, who riled up the crowd before her solo, was the first person to qualify for breakdancing at the Paris Olympics in 2024 – the first time the sport will be included. Later, Olympian and Nike fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first American Muslim woman to wear a hijab while competing at the Olympics, created a dramatic fencing sequence to a remix of viral Ice Spice track ‘In Ha Mood’. And later, paralympic champion track athlete Scout Bassett told her story of growing up in a Chinese orphanage, after being abandoned as a baby when she lost her right leg in an accident. Running allowed her to make connections in the US when she was adopted by an American family, aged eight.

Choreographer Parris Goebel made a cameo in one scene of the performance.Photo: Nike

Even beyond the Nike athletes, the show’s casting choices served to represent a more mindful approach to women’s fitness and sports. The company’s global insights team found there’d been a rise in anxiety and depression among young people coming out of the pandemic, with women disproportionately affected, Liz Weldon, Nike’s VP of global women’s brand management, says, while the TikTok hashtag #mentalhealth now has 92.4 billion views. And Nike’s female athletes, including tennis star Naomi Osaka, have publicly shared their struggles with mental health and the pressure of sport in recent times, she adds. “These are some of the things that we felt were blaring that we couldn’t ignore. We needed to make sure that we were serving a more holistic look at mind, body and life.”

In practical terms, this means rather than focusing on football or basketball in siloes, or focusing on winning or competitiveness, Nike Women will design for and market movement of all kinds, or moments of rest or mindfulness, to appeal to the everyday woman. “It’s about moving away from our old definition of what sport means and evolving the way that Nike communicates what sport means,” she says. “Now, it’s about understanding performance for your life, not necessarily performance for one activity. We’ve been outfitting Olympians athletes for a long time. It’s more so a shift to understanding the everyday person.”

Korean-American designer Yoon Ahn, founder of Ambush, aims to bring new audiences to sportswear with her Nike collaboration. “I take what could be on the athlete’s body and sugarcoat it in fashion,” she says “Then we can reach people who might not have paid attention to football or sport, they can start to understand how to wear [sportswear].”

Parris Goebel with some of the community of athletes, designers and talent who starred in or watched the show. Photo: Nike

In June, Nike launched a new initiative called the Well Collective, focused on five pillars of holistic fitness including movement, mindfulness, nutrition, rest and (interpersonal and community) connection. The company will provide resources and advice to help people’s holistic wellness across these verticals, with the help of 1,000 new trainers, to build out mindfulness, meditation and breathwork sessions on its popular Nike Training App (NTC), provide nutritional advice, sleep advice and more. All 125 Nike Live stores globally are now Well Collective stores, where the brand plans to hold community events. In addition, the @niketraining Instagram is now @nikewellcollective and the brand shuttered @nikeyoga, now blending all holistic fitness under one account.

“We shift to reflect the times that we’re in. As people, as we adapt. And this seems to be a recognition that this is what we need in order to move forward as a society and as a brand,” Weldon says. During Nike’s Q4 2023 earnings, CEO John Donahoe said The Well Collective project “sharpens [Nike’s] focus” on serving the opportunity it sees with women.

The Well Collective and ‘Goddess Awakened’ are both in response to new trends in fashion and fitness, too, says Tania Flynn, Nike’s VP of product design. In post-lockdown, hybrid working lives, women are wearing a blend of performance wear and fashion, transitioning their looks between working from home, working out and going out. Last night’s show intended to show off fashion for every portion of a woman’s life. It featured a blend of high performance sports bras, leggings and footwear and fashion items, from flowing dresses and long skirts.

“We used to look at it like there’s the lifestyle piece and the performance piece,” Flynn says. “Sports apparel has always influenced fashion but now it’s going further. We are aiming to expand the definition of the word athlete.”

The casting of the “Goddess Awakened” show was carefully done to showcase Nike’s innovations in size inclusivity in particular, with dancers of all shapes and sizes on the stage. This is a priority for Nike’s product team, says Flynn. Nike uses tens of thousands of body profiles to understand how best to grade sizing, considering variation in body type. One area of focus was the sports bra: Nike worked with a research lab to analyse breast dynamics and create a strappy bra with high support that doesn’t require bigger straps as it scales up.

The show’s goals were staggering: usher in a new era for Nike womenswear while expressing an understanding of mental health struggles and showing off fashion as well as fit and performance in one go. Early feedback was positive; the performance will soon be uploaded to YouTube for a broader audience. Weldon is confident in a test and learn approach to this new chapter.

“We’ve been innovating and we’ve been listening for 50 years, but now, as we look forward in the next 50, we have to keep listening and keep innovating,” says Weldon. “This is just the launch of the next era – which is nice. It’s like phase one.”

Scene 8, Together We Rise, depicted the power of connection for women in challenging times. Photo: Nike

The styling blended performance pieces with more fashion-led sportswear. Photo: Nike

Scene 3, entitled My Body My Power, featured voice over from Billie Eilish.Photo: Nike

The finale showed a full suite of Nike products in white, from tracksuits to tennis skirts. Photo: Nike

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