Women’s strength training has quietly become one of the most commercially underleveraged spaces in fashion, beauty and luxury, and a handful of brands are only now beginning to notice. Mugler’s first-ever handbag launch, fronted by female bodybuilder Tatiana Horslaville photographed naked against stark, sculptural lighting, was not a campaign about a bag. It was a claim on territory.
The Aurora bag, priced between $1,850 and $3,100 depending on style, is not what most people will remember. They’ll remember the arms. Shot under the creative direction of Miguel Castro Freitas and photographed by Chris Lensz, the campaign put a built, veined, flexed female physique at its centre and dared the industry to catch up.
For Mugler’s managing director, Adrian Corsin, it was simply about freshness. ‘A muscular femininity feels new in a world dominated with important discourse about body positivity, peptides, and overall health,’ he says. Fair point. It also happens to be exactly where consumer interest is heading.
The Numbers Behind Women’s Strength Training
The data is hard to argue with. Oura, the health-tracking company tracking toward $1 billion in 2025 sales after generating more than $500 million in revenue in 2024, recorded a 160% year-on-year increase in women tagging strength training workouts in June. Oura raised over $900 million in new funding in October at a roughly $11 billion valuation, which suggests the company has a fairly granular read on where fitness behaviour is heading.
On Strava, women are 21% more likely to upload a strength or weight training workout than men, according to its 2025 Sport Trend report. London’s Third Space luxury gym reported a 20% uptick in women attending strength and conditioning classes over the past year. These are not rounding errors in a niche category. They are signals of a structural shift in how women relate to fitness.
The GLP-1 moment is accelerating things further. As users of weight-loss drugs are advised to strength train two to three times per week to preserve muscle mass, more women are arriving at the weights rack for the first time. The ‘strong not skinny’ movement on social media has been building for years; Hyrox, the gym-based fitness competition, has grown a devoted female following; Hailey Bieber has swapped the reformer for weights. All of it is pulling in the same direction.
What Women’s Strength Training Actually Needs From Brands
The gap between this cultural moment and what the market currently offers is where it gets interesting. Celine launched a dumbbell. Balenciaga built a gym-adjacent pop-up in Paris. Gestures, mostly. The deeper opportunity belongs to brands willing to build for women who actually lift, rather than women who might like the idea of lifting.
Dany Garcia’s brand Danimás, which describes itself as an innovative media company and community, is the most complete attempt so far. Garcia, Chairwoman and CEO of The Garcia Companies under which Danimás operates, brings more than four decades of training to the venture. The brand launched its first collection of luxury weightlifting accessories in December, including leather gloves developed in collaboration with Cardillo, a craftsmanship brand with which Garcia has trained exclusively since her earliest competition preparation. Both the gloves and belts are made in America from Italian leathers; the gloves are designed to be worn with jewellery, not instead of it.
The apparel range, launching next month, was sized from a fit study conducted on real women who train three to five times per week. The brand’s fit model is a US 10 rather than the industry standard US 4. ‘We started with a body type that is true to this woman today,’ says Garcia. That woman, for Danimás, is primarily over 40.
Garcia produced the boxing film The Smashing Machine, starring Dwayne Johnson, and she is precise about visual language. ‘The gyms, the gloves, the tools, the accessories, the visuals are gritty and grimy and fuelled by testosterone,’ she says. ‘I realised 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.’
Beauty brands are joining in. Oribe launched a campaign with two French bodybuilders for its Hair Alchemy Bond Building Elixir, using muscle as a ‘visual metaphor’ for a product that strengthens hair from the inside out. Nina Khoury, formerly of Skims, has announced a forthcoming supplements brand, Sportiv, centred specifically on women who strength train.
The wellness spending context gives all of this commercial logic. McKinsey’s 2025 wellness report found that 84% of US consumers call wellness a top or important priority; the UK figure is 79%, China’s is 94%. When status symbols have shifted from Rolexes to Garmins and gym memberships, the question of who is making things worthy of that moment matters.
Gabriella Moriarty, a Hyrox elite athlete and fitness coach based in Manchester, puts it plainly: ‘We don’t go out. We don’t drink. The place we express ourselves is in the gym.’ For brands willing to meet that seriousness with equal seriousness, there is real money at the end of the barbell.
