#21: Alo Yoga

I know what you’re thinking—wait isn’t Alo Yoga a pricy athleisure brand? Why yes, yes it is. And said pricy athleisure brand has a brick-and-mortar store in New York City’s premiere shopping mall: Williamsburg. And in that store on Bedford Avenue—right next to the Apple Store, as is shopping mall genre covention—is a yoga studio.

Upon discovering the existence of a yoga studio within a store that peddles $78 crop tops I had a lot of questions. Has Alo always offered yoga classes, in all locations? Did the company start online, as I had assumed, or with physical stores? Could I even set foot in the establishment without spending an exorbitant amount of money on a sports bra?

As I mentally prepared to plumb the depths of capitalism’s dark heart (read: go to a yoga class inside a retail store), I loitered outside of a construction site around the corner, smoking a joint and reading about the brand on their website, hoping to get some answers.

To first give you a few tidbits that’ll provide an accurate summation of the brand on which to layer your understanding; I discovered that they once hosted an event where they sold skiwear and NFTs in Aspen. On the very long “About” page I learned that “alo” stands for “air, land, and ocean,” and when you’re shopping on their website, right under the “New Arrivals” tab is one titled “As Seen on Kendall and Kylie”.

My hunch was right re the brand’s origins—they began entirely online, and then rolled out dozens of physical stores, including a Los Angeles headquarters with a yoga studio that offered classes to the public. Following the success of that studio, they then added studios to a few of their existing retail locations. These three stores (Pacific Palisades, Brooklyn, and Georgetown—the white-woman-who-does-yoga triumvirate), out of scores of their physical locations across the US and Canada, also allegedly have a cafe inside—although the espresso machine in the back of the Williamsburg one appeared to be gathering cobwebs.

And if you need more evidence that their brand politics are in line with a very specific kind of clientele—like the LA people who are anti-vax and yet spend all their money on smoothies at Erewhon—get a load of this copy:

“…alo began in Los Angeles in 2007 because the founders wanted to spread good by bringing yoga to the world: to anyone who is experiencing the transformative power of yoga, to the world's best yogis who wear Alo because it's the only line that actually elevates their practice, to the celebrities and the fashion-forward ...”

I nearly gasped when I read this—the nerve to say that their clothing brand is the only one that “actually elevates” the “best yogis’” practice!

This was a bridge too far for me—when I was taught yoga at 12 or 13 by an ethnically ambiguous woman with an inscrutable accent in a tiny studio below a (quite delicious) Peruvian chicken place in a strip mall in my Maryland suburb, I was taught that yoga isn’t about being the best as in better than others, but a non-competitive spiritual practice that could be about challenging yourself to improve, for yourself and yourself only. She always said about yoga, in broken English like I’ve never heard since (again, where on Earth was this woman from??) “It’s not how far you go, it’s how you go far”. It doesn’t make grammatical sense, but the sentiment is iron-clad. That to me is yoga, and maybe I’m grossly misinformed (I often am) and there’s a whole competitive yoga community out there I know nothing of, but I thought it really wasn’t yoga’s raison d'être.

This is unfortunately the part of the newsletter where I must provide nuance / complicate the narrative in admitting I do really like their clothes—the spandexes are buttery soft and flattering—and furthermore the men’s clothes are very nice and purportedly comfortable while also being nice-looking enough to wear out.

Anyway, to do yoga at a place that I perceived to be the antithesis of yoga, obviously I needed to be stoned. But I suddenly felt like maybe I got far too high as I stepped into the brightly overhead-lit store and was immediately descended upon by a retail employee wearing a headset. When I finished fumbling my way through asking where the yoga was, they pointed to stairs in the middle of the store, and I waded through rows and rows of neatly folded tiny articles of clothing, in crisp blacks and whites, and trudged upstairs to talk to look for the next person with a headset.

A woman by the studio door wearing all black alo gear and chunky gold jewelry checked me in on an iPad, and said “the locker room is behind those ropes” pointing to a cordoned-off area with a sign that said “Employees only”, which is a great way to not allow retail customers to use the bathroom, while also making yoga customers feel like they’re being let in on a little secret.

Once I dropped my stuff, making the weird decision to leave my shoes in the locker room and walk barefoot across the shop floor, I entered the studio to find five yoga mats pre-arranged with two yoga blocks each next to them. The studio was small but not tiny—plenty of room for the five-person maximum—and had a wall with a galaxy mural at the front that read in Pinterest-y script “Yoga to the World”. At just four or five ClassPass credits, I was impressed that it so intimate—it’s rare that a yoga class in New York isn’t trying to cram you in like sardines or else charge an arm or a leg.

The instructor was expectedly stunning, wearing loose black alo sweatshorts ($74) slung low on her hips, a black crop alo baby tee ($58), and simple gold jewelry, her hair braided long down her back. I was so worried she could tell I was stoned and was going to kick me out, which in retrospect is hilarious—at any given time roughly half of North Brooklyn is high.

Preconceived notions aside, the yoga that followed rocked. In my experience, very few instructors in New York do hands-on adjustments anymore, whether it’s the #MeToo Movement or simply because there are too many inexperienced instructors who lack the expertise and confidence to adjust people without risking injury (to be clear, both of which are valid excuses). This instructor, however, performed several hands-on adjustments in earnest, truly manipulating my postures or encouraging me to go for a difficult arm balance, even holding my leg up for me at one point, all of which made me feel like I was improving my practice for the first time in years, a feeling I honestly hadn’t experienced since that pre-teen yoga class. At one point, with her help to enter the pose, I even got into a crazy arm balance I never could’ve imagined I would be capable of—it still feels like one of the coolest things my body can do.

Post-cool arm balance I felt like a superhero. Every time we were instructed to “walk, step, or hop to the front of your mat”—despite normally being a “walk” or “step” kind of girlie—you better believe I was hopping. Readers with a yoga teacher cert, do they tell you to use certain phrases verbatim in the teacher training? I hear the “walk, step, or hop” one in nearly every class and it makes me wonder. Sound off in the comments.

We finished the class with what the instructor called, “the most beautiful and most challenging pose, savasana” and while I’d have normally gagged at the sentiment I was so bought in at this point that I loved it. It is hard to just *be*.

When I got out, feeling deeply relaxed and bendy and like I was glowing, officially out of the luteal phase funk with which I entered the class, I saw I had a text from a friend saying “Wait, isn’t alo yoga where all the influencers go?” to which I replied that it tracks because I’m a niche micro-influencer in the fitness space, duh.

I still can’t believe that some of the best yoga I’ve experienced in New York City was inside of a retail space in Williamsburg, which I guess goes to show that you can’t judge a book by its very worst-LA-stereotypes-coded About page.