On Thursday night time on the Nike Air Innovation Summit in Paris, the sportswear big unveiled their Olympics uniforms for Staff USA with the assistance of athletes together with Serena Williams and Sha’Carri Richardson. Nearly instantly, the ladies’s working equipment sparked on-line chatter, together with from a few of the sport’s prime athletes themselves.

Even supposing Nike introduced a number of choices (together with a pair of shorts modeled by Richardson on the Palais Brongniart occasion), one uniform stood out: the shorts have been so high-cut that runners and followers alike fearful in regards to the athletes preserving their modesty. Some have been lighthearted jabs (Olympic hurdler Queen Harrison Claye joked that European Wax Middle ought to sponsor Staff USA for the Olympic Trials; the NCAA athlete Katelyn Hutchison replied “April fools was 10 days in the past”), whereas others expressed real confusion, inquiring if any girls have been concerned within the design course of.

Nike maintains these uniforms are their most technologically superior thus far, and that they solicited enter from a wide range of athletes to make sure the uniforms have been top-of-the-line. “Athlete insights proceed to function a elementary aspect that informs Nike’s equipment designs. Working immediately with athletes all through the method, Nike designed clothes on their our bodies to make sure match throughout physique sorts and infused real-time suggestions all through your entire growth course of,” Nike’s Chief Innovation Officer John Hoke informed Vogue in a press release.

Matthew Nurse, vp of Nike Sport Analysis Lab, informed WWD that the corporate consulted 5,000 athletes at their Beaverton, Oregon headquarters, 70% of them girls, “to handle the particular physique sort wants, together with variations in harm danger, efficiency, restoration challenges and hormonal fluctuations.”

Nonetheless, many are left questioning why feminine runners, pole vaulters, and hurdlers put on such high-cut briefs. Girls have been first permitted to compete in observe & subject on the Olympic Video games in 1928, and wore uniforms just like male runners. Whereas brief shorts have been de rigueur, they solely obtained tighter all through the years—noticeably so between the 1984 Los Angeles Video games and the 1988 Soeul Video games. Excessive-profile athletes like Florence Griffith Joyner helped popularize the spandex look.