Somewhere in a donation bin or a garage right now sits a decade-old Lululemon jacket nobody thought twice about giving away, and according to Depop’s own 2026 fashion trends report, that exact item is about to become a search-bar magnet. The platform’s data flags a trend it calls “Romanticized Sports” — a surge in searches for vintage Lululemon, upcycled sports jerseys and ski-inspired pieces — as shoppers start treating old athletic gear less like leftover gym wear and more like a genuine fashion category worth hunting down secondhand.

What Depop’s Data Actually Shows

The report describes the shift plainly: athletic clothing is being reimagined through a fashion lens, turning into something the company calls “elegant, playful, and escapist” rather than purely functional. That is a real repositioning. A ski jacket used to signal “I am going skiing.” Under Romanticized Sports, the same jacket signals a whole outfit built around texture and silhouette — worn with tailoring, styled the way people once treated a leather jacket or a trench coat. Depop’s trend list groups vintage Lululemon alongside jerseys, bike shorts and ski layers, all reworked into pieces meant to be seen rather than just sweated in.

Why Now, Specifically

Coverage of the same report from Who What Wear traces the trend’s rise to a spike in sports’ cultural visibility — television, film and major sporting events, including the 2026 World Cup, have put athletic aesthetics in front of a much wider audience than usual. That coverage also notes designers already running with the idea at a much higher price point, from Cecilie Bahnsen and Conner Ives to Oakley, Prada Linea Rossa and Martine Rose, all blending sport-derived shapes into runway-level fashion. Resale search behavior is catching the same wave from the other direction — instead of paying runway prices for a reinterpreted tracksuit, shoppers are going straight to the source: old gym bags and closets full of gear nobody wore twice.

Why Gym Bag Contents Specifically Matter

A decade-old piece of technical athletic wear has something most fast fashion does not: it was engineered, not just cut and sewn. Older Lululemon pieces, pre-dating the brand’s biggest mainstream boom, used fabric weights and stitching meant to survive repeated hard wear, which is exactly why they hold up decades later in a way a $15 fast-fashion legging never will. The same goes for old ski layers — genuine technical shells and fleece built for actual mountain conditions outperform decorative “ski-coded” pieces made only to look the part. A jersey from an old rec league or a defunct team carries a kind of specificity no reissue can replicate; it is not a costume of a sports aesthetic, it is the actual, worn artifact of one.

What to Actually Dig For

If Depop’s search data is a preview of where the resale market is headed, the smart move is checking exactly the bins most people skip past: the gym bag stuffed in a closet, a garage box of old ski gear, a drawer of team jerseys from a rec league or a high school team. Look for genuine technical fabric rather than printed athleisure, real team or brand markings rather than generic gym-wear branding, and pieces old enough to predate the current wave of “elevated athleisure” being sold at retail today. None of it needs to be flashy. The whole premise of Romanticized Sports, per Depop’s own framing, is that the everyday and the overlooked are what is actually being romanticized.

The Wider Athleisure Reversal

It helps to remember how recently “sporty” was treated as the opposite of stylish in secondhand circles. For years, resale shoppers combed racks for silk blouses, structured blazers and denim while athletic gear got shoved to the clearance corner, priced to move because nobody wanted it. Romanticized Sports flips that hierarchy without changing the actual objects — the same fleece pullover that sold for two dollars because it looked like gym leftovers is now the exact silhouette a $600 runway piece from Prada Linea Rossa is quoting. That gap between resale price and runway inspiration rarely stays open for long once search data starts documenting it publicly, which is part of why Depop is naming the trend now rather than waiting for it to peak.

The Pattern Worth Noticing

What ties Romanticized Sports to nearly every other resale trend cycle is the same underlying instinct: today’s forgotten utility item is tomorrow’s search spike, and the gap between those two moments is exactly where a smart thrifter gets to shop before prices catch up. Depop’s own data is not describing a hypothetical future demand — it is describing searches that are already climbing right now, on a platform with tens of millions of users watching the same closets everyone else is. The old gym bag was never actually worthless. It was just early.