The stats back this up. Data from Oura, revealed a 160% year-on-year increase in women tagging strength training workouts in June. On Strava, the social fitness app, women are 21% more likely to upload a strength or weight training workout than men, according to its 2025 Sport Trend report. Luxury gyms like Third Space are seeing a rising demand for women’s strength, with Caroline Bragg, a Third Space master Pilates trainer based in London, reporting a 20% uptick in women attending strength and conditioning classes this past year.
If strength is becoming a status symbol, then weights are the new visual cue. Celine launched a dumbbell last year, while Balenciaga’s fitness collection launched with a pop-up in Paris, designed to mimic a gym, with lightweight dumbbells and kettlebells on display. Yet, outside these more gimmick activations, luxury labels and athleisure brands have largely focused on more holistic wellness and traditional sports over strength training for women. They could be missing a growing opportunity.
Beauty brands are also tapping in. Last month, Nina Khoury, the former vice president of strategic operations for Skims, announced the forthcoming launch of Sportiv, a women’s supplements brand centered around women who strength train. In June, haircare brand Oribe launched a campaign with two French bodybuilders for its Hair Alchemy Bond Building Elixir. According to Diana LaMura-Scarrone, the vice president of marketing and creative for Oribe, muscle was a “visual metaphor” for the product, which strengthens hair strands from the inside out. “Whether viewers read it as a counter-narrative to the GLP-1 era, or a statement on female empowerment, the imagery challenges the idea that luxury beauty must look a certain way.”
Products tailor-made for strength
The earliest disruptor of the luxury strength space is Danimás founder Garcia. With more than four decades of training under her weightlifting belt, she launched Danimás in 2025 to plug what she felt was a very clear gap in the market: a business that owns the culture and conversation of women’s strength training. It launched in April 2025 with a newsletter (also newly on Substack, called “The Huddle”) that publishes culture-led stories around training, strength and style. Last December, it dropped its first collection: luxury weightlifting accessories. Danimás is the first luxury brand to truly center itself completely within the gym.
Historic versions of weightlifting gloves look like gardening gloves, which is why many women do not wear them. Danimás positions them as crafted like a luxury bag, alongside its leather belts for strength training; both are made in America using Italian leathers, and the gloves are designed to be worn with, and to protect, jewelry — offering fashion and function. Next month, the brand will launch apparel, which is set to look nothing like typical gymwear — and which has been sized on real women with muscle who train three to five times per week.
“We conducted a fit study, and sat down to speak with women to get a true assessment of who our female training is, and what her size is,” says Garcia, noting the brand’s fit model is a US 10, instead of the industry’s standard US 4. (Danimás’s target demographic is women over 40.) “We started with a body type that is true to this woman today.”