Tala: The Inclusive Activewear Brand Getting It Right

The Standard the Fitness Industry Built Into Every Campaign

Activewear has one job: to support the body during movement. Exercise is good for you, for mental health as much as physical health, and there is no version of that fact that comes with a body type attached. The fitness industry managed to imply otherwise for decades.

Activewear borrowed from fashion's broader playbook — narrow body as default, everyone else as afterthought — but the stakes here are higher than in other categories. Fashion advertising that excludes certain bodies creates shame and comparison; activewear advertising that excludes certain bodies can actively discourage physical activity altogether, and those are meaningfully different consequences. Exercise is not aesthetic. It is a basic need, and the imagery surrounding it has been quietly suggesting for years that access is conditional on how you look first.

Tala: The Inclusive Activewear Brand That Didn't Decide Who Gets to Work Out

Grace Beverley launched Tala in London in 2019 because she couldn't find activewear that was sustainable, genuinely size-inclusive, and affordable, all at once. The brand built all three in from the start. Sizes run from a UK 4 to 20, which Beverley has described as non-negotiable: "That was just one of the things that we knew that the industry needed to fix." The campaigns show a real range of body types, skin tones, and identities — not a diversity-washed version of the same narrow ideal. The product language is about comfort and function, not transformation. The clothes are for moving in, and the body wearing them does not need to qualify first.

Tala's campaigns show a genuine range of body types, skin tones, and identities as a matter of routine rather than a campaign moment. The clothes exist to support movement, and the body doing the moving does not have a template. The product language avoids the transformation framing that saturates this category: the clothes aren't positioned as tools to fix or change the body— they're positioned as clothes.

That might sound like a low bar, but for most of activewear's mainstream history, its advertising featured one body type almost exclusively: lean and toned. Those are the bodies running, lifting, and stretching — the bodies the product was apparently designed for. Anyone whose body looked different had a clear message: the advertising was not speaking to them, and somewhere in that repetition a quiet assumption settled in that the gym was for people who already looked like this.

That assumption stops people from exercising, and not in some abstract way. Body image anxiety around exercise is a documented barrier to physical activity, particularly among people who already struggle with how they feel about their bodies. When someone walks into a gym or fitness class and every piece of marketing surrounding them reflects a body they do not have, they feel like they are in the wrong room.

People already anxious about how their bodies look are the ones who most need the physical and mental benefits of regular movement, and they are exactly the people most likely to stay home because the whole culture around exercise has signalled it was not built for them. That is a serious health consequence, and it comes directly from an industry deciding that activewear advertising needed to look a certain way. When activewear campaigns reinforce that standard rather than challenge it, the harm is not incidental — it is structural.

What an Inclusive Activewear Brand Changes About the Experience

When a broader range of bodies appears in activewear imagery consistently — not as a token campaign but as the unremarkable default — it changes who feels like they belong in exercise spaces. Bodies that are persistently absent from fitness imagery are also persistently underserved in sizing, in design, and in the basic assumption about who the product is for. Sizing, representation, and the language around products are not separate gestures toward inclusion; they are all part of the same question about who the category was designed for.

The fitness industry has been selling a fiction: that exercise belongs to a specific aesthetic, and that activewear is part of that aesthetic first and functional clothing second. Tala inverts that premise — the clothes are for movement, and every body moves. None of this was complicated — it just was not the priority.

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Index:MH sets measurable standards for how the beauty and fashion industry affects consumer mental health. To find out more or to nominate a brand that's getting it right, visit indexmh.org.