Do Lululemon’s Leggings Seem…Smaller to You?

A specter is haunting Lululemon shoppers—the specter of tiny leggings. At least that’s what some of the brand’s adult customers seem to believe. A thread on the r/lululemon subreddit from March, bluntly titled “Has their clothing gotten smaller or am I just getting fatter lol,” garnered hundreds of comments from people convinced that something about the garments has changed.

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

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

Others chimed in that although they’d stayed the same size in other clothing, remained the same weight, or 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 in the brand’s garments over the past 6 to 10 years, with an even bigger shift since 2020. “I find the sizing discrepancies right now are major between different legging models,” she says. “A 6 in Align could be a 14 in another legging. The disparity makes me feel frustrated—it’s much harder to shop at Lululemon now than it was before the pandemic.”

Maddie Ball, a 29-year-old living in San Francisco, tells SELF another sizing issue showed up for her in an even 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 fake,” she tells SELF.

I reviewed screenshots of the unhappy customer’s complaint, and…whew: “These ‘size 6’ leggings will not even go past my knee they are so small,” the person wrote. “Also as you can see in the picture the texture of the leggings is grainy, I have a pair of size 6 Lululemon leggings that I bought 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 different line of Lulu clothing than the ones 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 quality of Lulu’s activewear has changed for the worse. “I own shorts, tops, leggings, headbands, purses, yoga mats, multiple other types of accessories, and I feel the quality for the clothing pieces themselves, especially the leggings, has changed to the extreme,” she says. “My first pair of leggings, purchased over 15 years ago, are still in mint condition with nothing wrong with them despite YEARS of use. Lulu these days simply cannot compare.”