The Rich Aren’t Getting Ripped
Luxury body aesthetics has moved on. If your brand is still selling transformation, you’re already behind.
How Class Consciousness Is Reshaping Fitness Aesthetics
May 2025
TLDR: This analysis explores how fitness aesthetics are diverging along class lines, with the hyper-muscular look increasingly associated with lower socioeconomic groups while upper echelons embrace leaner physiques developed through exclusive sports.
• Hyper-muscular fitness associated with lower socioeconomic groups.
• Upper echelons favor leaner physiques from exclusive sports.
• Shift from isolated fitness to communal athletic experiences.
• Strategic implications for luxury and lifestyle brands.
• Architecture of physical-social spaces for competitive moats.
• Frameworks for resisting commodification and fostering customer relationships.
Quick reminder: Catch our conversation with Timothy Robertson on "Status Signals: Luxury 3.0" tomorrow at 9 AM GMT on all major podcast platforms.
At precisely this moment, as spring yields gleefully to summer and social media fills with algorithmic reminders of bodily inadequacy, a curious recalibration is occurring beneath the predictable cycle of seasonal anxiety.
The perennial pressure to unveil a beach-ready physique remains, but the physique itself has changed. Or rather, the body that signifies success has fractured along lines that reveal more about our social architecture than our biological one.
Walk through Manhattan's West Village at 7 AM and you'll notice them: the slender figures in perfectly distressed technical apparel, moving with the unhurried confidence that comes from bodies that appear neither labored over nor neglected.
Their form, lean, subtly muscled, seemingly maintained rather than manufactured, whispers a particular kind of achievement. Meanwhile, across town in certain parts of Queens or the Bronx, a different physical vernacular prevails: bodies built with deliberate, even defiant, volume, showcasing the unmistakable geometry of disciplined hypertrophy.
Between these physical dialects lies a widening gulf that has less to do with exercise science than with the complex grammar of class aspiration. The aspirations themselves are familiar: the desire to be seen, to belong, to embody success. The insecurities, too, remain constant: the fear of exclusion, of visible effort, of misreading the room. What's changed is how these universal human drives are finding expression across an increasingly stratified fitness landscape.
For luxury hospitality groups and premium retail brands, this divergence presents both challenge and opportunity. The challenge is how to architect physical spaces and experiences that accommodate the subtle but profound shift from bodies that display achievement to bodies that suggest inheritance. The opportunity is creating ecosystems of belonging that, once established, resist competitive incursion precisely because they cannot be easily replicated.
As another summer approaches with its heightened scrutiny of physical form, the contest isn't merely for who can sell the most effective workout gear or diet plan. It's for who can most convincingly author the narrative spaces where bodies acquire meaning, where the anxious search for improvement transforms into the calmer pleasure of confirmation. Some brands have glimpsed this future; most are still selling products when they should be designing worlds.
The gym floor has always been a theater of physical aspiration, but the protagonist's shape is changing. Where once the hyper-muscular physique reigned supreme, all bulging trapezius muscles and biceps demanding their own zip codes, a new silhouette has emerged among the status-conscious upper echelons: leaner, more lithe, and less overtly augmented.
This isn't merely an aesthetic pivot; it's a social recalibration. As steroids and performance-enhancing drugs have proliferated among mainstream gym-goers, the resulting hypertrophied physique has undergone a subtle reclassification. What was once the carefully cultivated hallmark of dedication has been quietly relegated to a lower socioeconomic signifier. In its place, the bodies cultivated on tennis courts, in boutique Pilates studios, and along curated running routes have ascended as markers of discernment and status.
But the shift extends beyond mere physiology into the realm of social architecture. After decades of atomized fitness, from the isolated repetitions of bodybuilding to the algorithmic solitude of personalized workout apps, we're witnessing the renaissance of communal movement. The upper echelons aren't just pursuing different bodies; they're inhabiting different social spaces, rejecting the hyper-individualism that defined wellness in the digital age.
The Class Topography of Physical Form
The association between muscularity and class has historical precedent. In the dawn of modern bodybuilding, visible muscle was "considered the mark of a lowly field hand" while the upwardly mobile middle class concerned themselves with commerce rather than calisthenics. The wealthy, when they bothered with physical cultivation at all, preferred activities that signaled refinement rather than raw strength.
Today's version of this class demarcation is more nuanced but no less potent. The extreme muscular development once celebrated as peak masculinity now carries the faint stigma of excess: too obvious, too manufactured, too accessible.
In conversations with several luxury brand strategists, I've repeatedly encountered a particular insight: the overtly muscular look has become democratized through pharmaceutical shortcuts. When anything becomes too available, the truly privileged inevitably pivot toward alternatives that maintain exclusivity.
This exclusivity now manifests in activities with higher barriers to entry, not just financially, but socially and culturally. Tennis, with its complex etiquette and expensive club memberships, has experienced a renaissance among the status-conscious.
Once dismissed as stuffy by younger generations, it now enjoys renewed cachet precisely because it isn't for everyone. The sport functions as "a breeding ground for the upper class" where participants learn not just athletic skills but also "how to dress, how to act, and how to sound."
The Return to Community
Perhaps the most telling aspect of this shift is not the changing shape of bodies but the reconfiguration of social space. The individualistic ethos that defined fitness in the 1990s and 2000s, epitomized by the solitary bodybuilder before a mirror or the isolated runner with earbuds firmly inserted, is yielding to something more communal.
This isn't nostalgia but calculated correction, a deliberate pivot away from the fractured experience of digital fitness.
In private conversations with wellness directors at several top hospitality groups, I've noted a remarkable pattern: they're witnessing a migration away from the isolated pursuit of physical perfection. After two decades of algorithmically personalized workouts and fitness trackers that turned exercise into a competition with oneself, their affluent clientele exhibits a palpable hunger for collective experience.
This hunger manifests most visibly in the explosion of boutique fitness classes, running clubs, and tennis leagues among the affluent. The appeal isn't merely the activity itself but the carefully curated community it provides, a physical antidote to the digital siloing that has defined much of modern life.
When a SoulCycle instructor knows your name or your tennis partner saves your usual court time, you've purchased something more valuable than exercise: you've secured belonging.
The community aspect carries particular currency in a post-pandemic world where physical presence has become the ultimate luxury. The shared breath of a Pilates class, the synchronized movement of rowers on water, the ritualistic exchange of tennis serves; these aren't merely fitness activities but embodied performances of collective identity, all the more precious for their contrast with virtual alternatives.
I've observed firsthand at several invitation-only health clubs that the upper middle class isn't just buying better bodies. They're investing in social architectures that digital platforms promised but never quite delivered. The running route through gentrified neighborhoods or the tennis club's seasonal tournament structure create narrative continuity in lives otherwise fragmented by digital disruption.
This return to community doesn't signal a rejection of technology but its sophisticated integration. The communal run is still tracked by GPS, the tennis match still analyzed by motion sensors, but these technologies now serve social rituals rather than replacing them. The quantified self has evolved into the qualified community, with metrics becoming conversation pieces rather than solitary obsessions.
The Luxury Market Response
Brands have detected this cultural shift with the sensitivity of seismographs. High-end activewear has abandoned the bodybuilder aesthetic in favor of designs that signal participation in more exclusive athletic pursuits. The marketing imagery has pivoted from muscular models in industrial gym settings to lithe figures on private tennis courts or running through expensively deserted landscapes.
Luxury brands have strategically entered the fitness market by giving "an athletic update to traditional luxury fabrics," allowing them to "break into the upper echelons of the fashion universe, a place no athleisure brand has been before." These brands aren't selling performance so much as belonging, access to a world where fitness is less about transformation and more about affirmation.
Traditional bodybuilder gyms, meanwhile, are struggling. The spaces that cultivated the hypertrophied aesthetic are being squeezed out by boutique fitness studios offering experiences explicitly designed for higher-income clientele.
The Future Physique: Projections to 2030
Looking ahead to 2030, this divergence between class-associated body ideals will likely intensify. Several trends suggest this trajectory:
First, as health monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, the ability to optimize one's physiology rather than merely enlarge it will become the new frontier of physical privilege. The elite will focus less on visible muscle mass and more on invisible metrics such as recovery capacity, metabolic efficiency, and cellular regeneration, accessible only through expensive biomonitoring systems.
Second, environmental pressures may accelerate the shift away from resource-intensive body cultivation. The protein requirements and environmental footprint of maintaining substantial muscle mass may be reframed as ecologically irresponsible, providing ethical cover for what is essentially an aesthetic class distinction.
Third, the activities that shape the privileged physique will further stratify. Beyond tennis and running, expect regenerative practices like proprietary breathing methods and exclusive movement disciplines to gain prominence. These will shape bodies in ways that signal initiation into rarefied knowledge systems rather than mere access to weights or chemicals.
The Strategic Moat of Relationship Architecture
For brands, the implications of this shift extend far beyond the ephemeral cycle of trend prediction and response. What we're witnessing is nothing less than the redistribution of physical and social capital, a remapping of how bodies acquire value through context. The brands that recognize this aren't merely adapting their product lines; they're fabricating entire ecosystems that, once established, function as nearly impenetrable competitive moats.
Consider the fundamental difference between selling a running shoe and cultivating a running culture. The former exists in a perpetual state of competitive vulnerability, forever one technological innovation or aesthetic pivot away from obsolescence. The latter creates a social architecture that, once inhabited, generates its own gravitational pull. You can switch sneakers casually; you don't so easily abandon the Thursday morning run group that knows your name, pace, and coffee preference.
This is the sublime sleight-of-hand that transforms a transactional relationship into an existential one. The most sophisticated brands are quietly moving from the business of producing objects to the more defensible position of designing contexts. And contexts, unlike products, resist commodification precisely because they can't be perfectly replicated. A tennis club in London's Hampstead carries a social signature distinct from one in New York's Tribeca, even if both serve identical demographic segments.
What makes these physical-social architectures such formidable competitive barriers isn't their exclusivity alone but their irreproducibility. Even with identical resources, a competitor cannot simply manifest the accumulated histories, inside jokes, seasonal rituals, and unspoken hierarchies that develop organically within these cultivated communities. Each becomes a micro-culture with its own creation myths and folk heroes. The community that forms around a brand-facilitated physical practice doesn't just consume products; it inhabits a narrative space where identity itself is partially authored by brand participation.
This isn't an entirely new dynamic; country clubs and yacht basins have functioned this way for generations. What's novel is its deliberate application across wider market segments. The democratization of exclusivity is the peculiar paradox at work here, with each socioeconomic segment offered precisely the form of belonging that mirrors its self-conception.
The strategic prize isn't customer loyalty, that quaint relic of marketing's vocabulary, but something far more valuable: customer inertia. When a brand successfully architects a physical community, it creates switching costs that transcend the rational calculus of price and performance. Leaving such a community means not simply adopting a different product but extracting oneself from a social identity. Few marketing budgets can overcome that particular activation barrier.
For the C-suite strategist, the implication is clear: the future belongs not to those who design better products but to those who design better belonging. The considerable resources required to architect these physical-social spaces represent not an operational expense but a structural investment in competitive insulation. The running club, tennis league, or calisthenics community becomes not a marketing channel but a proprietary distribution network through which products flow as almost incidental tokens of membership.
In a market relentlessly flattened by digital access and comparison, these three-dimensional social architectures restore the possibility of genuine differentiation. They can't be screenshot, price-compared, or perfectly imitated. The most sophisticated brands are thus engaged not in the production of goods but in the far more defensible business of world-building, crafting physical and social spaces that, once inhabited, reshape desire itself from within.
Strategic Implications: Architecting Physical Community
As this shift toward communal sport accelerates toward 2030, brands face a strategic imperative that extends beyond product design into spatial choreography. The question is no longer simply what to wear while exercising but where and with whom.
Forward-thinking brands are already moving beyond passive sponsorship into active curation of physical communities:
Luxury hotels are replacing anonymous gyms with branded sport academies featuring resident coaches and seasonal tournaments for regular guests.
Residential developers are designing communities around shared athletic infrastructure, private tennis pavilions, mapped running routes, and boathouses that function as physical social networks.
Fashion houses are quietly establishing invitation-only athletic clubs that translate their aesthetic principles into movement protocols, creating embodied extensions of their design philosophies.
Fitness companies are evolving from equipment suppliers to community architects, designing modular spaces that facilitate the right kind of social interaction between the right kind of participants.
The most sophisticated players recognize that they're not selling access to equipment or even expertise, but to calibrated social friction, the productive resistance of bodies moving together in choreographed proximity.
The Path Forward: From Product to Protocol
This shift represents neither progress nor regress but simply the next iteration in how we negotiate status through physical form. The move toward communal, exclusive athletic pursuits is already underway, propelled by post-pandemic hunger for authentic connection and reaction against digital atomization.
For brands seeking to navigate this landscape, success will come not from judgments about the trend's merits but from precision in execution. The winners will be those who understand that they're not selling a static physical ideal but a dynamic social algorithm, a protocol for how bodies relate to other bodies in space and time.
The most valuable offering won't be a product that promises transformation but an ecosystem that confirms belonging. In this new paradigm, the brand's role is not to impose aesthetics but to architect experiences, creating environments where certain types of bodies and movements become not just possible but inevitable.
As we approach 2030, the question isn't whether this class-based physical divergence will continue; it will. The question is which brands will most elegantly facilitate its expression. The future belongs to those who understand that the most compelling luxury is not an object or even a body, but precisely the right company in which to move it.
Putting Theory into Practice
The translation of these principles into market realities would require a nuanced understanding of how physical aspiration stratifies across socioeconomic landscapes. While most brands have not yet fully embraced this potential, forward-thinking companies might soon architect not just products or services but entire ecosystems of participation calibrated to the precise relationship between performance and visibility that resonates with their target markets.
The Middle-Aspirant Segment
For brands targeting the middle and aspirational classes, the imperative would be visibility within a framework of earned merit. The calisthenics park exemplifies this potential perfectly, an open-air theater where bodies might display not merely aesthetic achievement but acquired skill.
Unlike the brute accumulation of traditional bodybuilding, calisthenics demands a progression of technical mastery visible to observers. The human flag, the muscle-up, the front lever; these movements cannot be purchased but must be earned through disciplined practice.
A sporting goods brand could create urban "movement pavilions," architectural interventions in public space that facilitate these displays while subtly branding the experience. While Nike has tentatively explored this territory with running clubs, the potential remains largely untapped.
The key would be creating spaces accessible enough to attract participants but demanding enough to create natural stratification, public stages where achievement can be witnessed, photographed, and shared, allowing the middle class to enact its meritocratic narrative through physical performance.
What would make these spaces compelling is precisely their publicness. The participant performs not just the movement but the values of transparency, effort, and earned status. The body is displayed in the act of mastering itself rather than in static completion.
Brands like Nike or Under Armour might evolve from mere equipment suppliers to curators of these performance spaces, creating graduated challenges that allow participants to publicly mark their progress.
The Upper-Middle Segment
Moving up the socioeconomic ladder, we find a more complex negotiation between visibility and exclusivity. For the established upper-middle class, the display would need to appear incidental rather than intentional, a natural consequence of participation rather than its purpose.
Here, the boutique tennis club or members-only running group offers the perfect spatial solution, environments that are technically private but strategically visible. While Lacoste has sponsored tennis events and some clubs have adopted elements of this approach, few brands have fully realized the potential of "curated semi-publicity," spaces where participation is exclusive but performance is selectively visible to the right audience.
Brands like Lacoste or Tracksmith could further develop this delicate balance, providing apparel distinctive enough to signal belonging when glimpsed in motion but understated enough to maintain the fiction that signaling is not the intent.
These brands might architect not just products but social contexts, seasonal tournaments, and invitation-only meets, where the right kind of performance can be witnessed by the right kind of audience.
The Ultra-High Net Worth Segment
At the apex of the market, the ultra-wealthy require neither public validation nor semi-public recognition. Their physical practices could retreat behind private walls, not merely for security but for the ultimate luxury of authentic experience unsullied by performative necessity.
The private island yoga retreat, the invitation-only ski lodge, and the hidden tennis court accessible only by helicopter; these spaces would create what we might call "secluded authenticity," where the absence of the public gaze allows for a performance paradoxically freed from performance anxiety. Here, participation itself rather than its documentation becomes the marker of status.
Brands like Loro Piana or Brunello Cucinelli have begun to understand this inversion but have not yet fully developed it. They could architect spaces where the ultra-wealthy practice physical activities with neither the burden of spectacle nor the contamination of aspirational observation.
The body developed in these contexts, lean, understated, suggesting ancestral rather than acquired fitness, would become recognizable only to others with the cultural capital to read its subtle signifiers.
By 2030, these theoretical principles could be fully realized in the marketplace. The brands that master this delicate choreography will find themselves not merely selling to the fitness market but defining the very terms of physical aspiration. The body, eternally a canvas for social distinction, awaits its next curator.
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Tomorrow on The Creative Fix: "Status Signals: Luxury 3.0"
Our conversation with Timothy Robertson drops tomorrow morning, and it's a fascinating dive into the invisible architecture of luxury relationships.
Timothy introduces his concept of "Luxury 3.0" moving beyond products (1.0) and experiences (2.0) into a world where relationship design becomes the primary focus of luxury brands.
As he puts it: "The most valuable thing luxury brands create isn't the product or even the experience, but the carefully choreographed relationships between clients who would never otherwise meet."
9 AM GMT on all major podcast platforms. Set your reminders!
-Kristoff
What an inspiring teaser. I will tune in to the podcast episode. Well done Kristoff.