It’s Time for Brands to Invest in Women Who Lift

When French fashion house Mugler launched its first-ever handbag in June, it did so with a bold campaign. In it, Tatiana Horslaville, a female bodybuilder, was photographed naked — the lighting casting exquisite shadows across her sculpted physique, which rippled with muscle, tissue and veins. Her arms flexed as she carried the black, rectangular Aurora bag, imitating an outer dumbbell curl. It was disarming and disruptive, especially for an industry where size inclusivity is clearly treated as a passing trend.

For Adrian Corsin, Mugler’s managing director, the rarity of this physique in women’s fashion brought something “fresh” in a sea of sameness. “A muscular femininity feels new in a world dominated with important discourse about body positivity, peptides, and overall health,” he says. The main character of the campaign was not the bag, but the body.

It’s not the first time fashion has honed in on women’s muscles. From Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography of ’80s bodybuilder Lisa Lyon to Collina Strada’s Fall/Winter 2024 “Stronger” runway show, featuring muscular, athletic models, there have been some rare examples through the years. Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli also took inspiration from a built physique for his 2021 couture collection, where abs and deltoids turned into surrealist architecture on evening gowns, while Cara Delevingne wore a Thom Browne dress embellished with beads that mimicked muscle and tissue to the Oscars in February.

But Mugler’s recent campaign hit at a critical moment in the cultural body conversation. The rise of GLP-1s has made thinness more accessible, while users of the drugs are being advised to up their protein intake and strength train two to three times per week to preserve muscle mass as they lose fat. This all means even more people are finding themselves in the gym.

While for men, building (and showing off) muscle is an increasingly complicated subject, owing to its association with looksmaxxers, muscle for women is being reframed. And even beyond GLP-1 users, the “strong not skinny” movement on social media, the growth of gym-based fitness competition Hyrox and stars like Hailey Bieber swapping the reformer machine for weights is attracting a whole new generation of women to the weight rack.

“All these conversations are happening at the same time, digitally and in real life,” says Dany Garcia, a former professional bodybuilder and founder of Danimás, a New York-based women’s luxury brand based on strength training, which launched last year. “In the past one to two years in culture, there has been a swirl [of interest] around strength, leading to a crest in culture. It’s a real moment in time.”

The stats back this up. Data from Oura, revealed a 160% year-on-year increase in women tagging strength training workouts in June. On Strava, the social fitness app, women are 21% more likely to upload a strength or weight training workout than men, according to its 2025 Sport Trend report. Luxury gyms like Third Space are seeing a rising demand for women’s strength, with Caroline Bragg, a Third Space master Pilates trainer based in London, reporting a 20% uptick in women attending strength and conditioning classes this past year.

If strength is becoming a status symbol, then weights are the new visual cue. Celine launched a dumbbell last year, while Balenciaga’s fitness collection launched with a pop-up in Paris, designed to mimic a gym, with lightweight dumbbells and kettlebells on display. Yet, outside these more gimmick activations, luxury labels and athleisure brands have largely focused on more holistic wellness and traditional sports over strength training for women. They could be missing a growing opportunity.

Beauty brands are also tapping in. Last month, Nina Khoury, the former vice president of strategic operations for Skims, announced the forthcoming launch of Sportiv, a women’s supplements brand centered around women who strength train. In June, haircare brand Oribe launched a campaign with two French bodybuilders for its Hair Alchemy Bond Building Elixir. According to Diana LaMura-Scarrone, the vice president of marketing and creative for Oribe, muscle was a “visual metaphor” for the product, which strengthens hair strands from the inside out. “Whether viewers read it as a counter-narrative to the GLP-1 era, or a statement on female empowerment, the imagery challenges the idea that luxury beauty must look a certain way.”

The earliest disruptor of the luxury strength space is Danimás founder Garcia. With more than four decades of training under her weightlifting belt, she launched Danimás in 2025 to plug what she felt was a very clear gap in the market: a business that owns the culture and conversation of women’s strength training. It launched in April 2025 with a newsletter (also newly on Substack, called “The Huddle”) that publishes culture-led stories around training, strength and style. Last December, it dropped its first collection: luxury weightlifting accessories. Danimás is the first luxury brand to truly center itself completely within the gym.

Historic versions of weightlifting gloves look like gardening gloves, which is why many women do not wear them. Danimás positions them as crafted like a luxury bag, alongside its leather belts for strength training; both are made in America using Italian leathers, and the gloves are designed to be worn with, and to protect, jewelry — offering fashion and function. Next month, the brand will launch apparel, which is set to look nothing like typical gymwear — and which has been sized on real women with muscle who train three to five times per week.

“We conducted a fit study, and sat down to speak with women to get a true assessment of who our female training is, and what her size is,” says Garcia, noting the brand’s fit model is a US 10, instead of the industry’s standard US 4. (Danimás’s target demographic is women over 40.) “We started with a body type that is true to this woman today.”

The gym sector has historically followed that same masculine narrative. “The gyms, the gloves, the tools, the accessories — the visuals are gritty and grimy and fueled by testosterone,” says Garcia, who recently produced the boxing film The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, and is more aware than most about the optics of visuals. “I realized how much more alluring [the gym] would be with tools that had glamour; with items that reflected the rest of women’s lives outside training.”

One pair of Danimás’s leather gloves features a front zip pocket, which can store an AirPods case or an emergency tampon; another pair is rendered in metallic silver leather. According to Garcia, accessories like gloves can give a “surprise and delight” to women while in the gym — will they become the must-have gym accessory? “Every time you’re reaching for a weight, you’re getting that visual reminder that there is something very special going on; you can look in the mirror and have a moment of celebration that you’re getting stronger,” Garcia says.

This is the very beginning of a new bodily bell curve within luxury. Reframing the visuals of women’s strength is an important evolution in making more women feel like strength training is for them. “Brands shift participation in sport more than any other player,” says Nicola Strange, co-founder of Beyond, an insights strategy that works with Nike. “When brands wield their power well, they create worlds that make participation both possible and aspirational. We’ve seen it happen with cycling and running, and it’s really exciting to see it happen with strength now.”

Demand for quality tools and apparel is already there. Gabriella Moriarty, a Hyrox elite athlete and fitness coach based in Manchester, UK, is just one woman who is excited about this shift: as a self-described glam girl with a muscular physique, she feels the market has been very underserved. “Women want to be seen and represented,” says Moriarty, who doesn’t only live and train like a professional athlete, but she and her friends socialize through fitness, too.

There’s an opportunity for more luxury brands to speak to women like them — women who aren’t necessarily Pilates princesses, but still spend time thinking about the outfits, hairstyles and beauty products they wear to workout. They spend money on it, too. “We don’t go out. We don’t drink. The place we express ourselves is in the gym,” says Moriarty.

In an era when we are spending exponentially on fitness and wellbeing, there is a huge opportunity for growth in women’s strength as a sector. In the US, 84% of customers say wellness is a “top” or “important” priority, according to McKinsey’s 2025 wellness report. In the UK, the figure is 79%; in China, it’s 94%.

The definition of what is covetable has changed, too. People have switched Rolex watches for Garmins and they’re competitive about sleep scores; a status symbol is an Erewhon smoothie or a gym membership, combined with enough time in the day to workout. What becomes of luxury? “Muscle is luxury,” says Garcia. The time, intention and attention required to build muscle is a delayed gratification. “It’s like David chipping away at Michelangelo. There is no casualness to the creation of muscle.”