GANNI x lululemon Takes the Studio Floor

In 1983 Jennifer Beals played a Pittsburgh welder chasing one dance audition. Forty-three years later she is back in a rehearsal studio, this time for GANNI and lululemon.

Jonathan Cheung, global creative director at lululemon, traces the whole project back to a single early conversation. When the two sides first started talking, GANNI creative director Ditte Reffstrup named dance as her own movement practice, and by Cheung’s account everything else flowed from that answer. What he likes most about the result, he has said, is the way lululemon’s technical materials carry GANNI’s instantly recognizable style. What came out the other side is a 22-piece collection spanning women’s apparel, accessories and footwear, built on lululemon’s technical fabrics and dressed in the Copenhagen label’s leopard print, ruffles and loud color pairings.

Reffstrup’s reference point is specific. In the brands’ joint announcement she said “80s dance movies have been part of my life since I was a child,” adding that she wanted the drive and freedom of those films carried into the collection’s colors and details. The result reads like a costume rail pulled from that decade and rebuilt for 2026: leg warmers, boleros and headbands alongside fitted jackets and tights meant to move between the studio and the street without a change of clothes.

Signal. What happened: GANNI and lululemon announced their first collaboration on October 8, 2026, a dance-inspired collection backed by a campaign titled “Joy Is a Power Move” starring actor Jennifer Beals and singer and dancer METTE. Exact object: the GANNI x lululemon collection, 22 pieces across women’s apparel, accessories and footwear, including a ruffle-trimmed version of lululemon’s Define Jacket and pieces cut in Nulu and Brushed Softstreme fabrics. When and where: October 15 worldwide at lululemon.com, GANNI.com and select stores of both brands in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with Japan following on October 16 at lululemon’s Harajuku and Aoyama stores and its Japanese online store. Source: the joint brand announcement. Why it matters: it places one of Copenhagen’s most recognizable ready-to-wear labels inside the best-known name in technical yoga apparel, weeks after lululemon installed a new chief executive charged with sharpening product and cultural relevance. Inside the 22 Pieces

 

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The anchor is the Define Jacket, the fitted zip-up that lululemon’s own retail copy bills as a fan favorite. GANNI’s version, the Define Ruffle-Trim Jacket, edges that familiar silhouette in frills and comes in two colorways: Espresso with Cherry Blossom Pink, and a Leopard Multi print. A second outer layer, the Ruffle-Trim Textured Jacket, runs in Black and Coconut Ivory, trading the Define’s smooth face for surface texture. Leopard itself is not new territory for lululemon, which already sells a Nulu Define Jacket in a print it calls True Leopard, at $138 through US stockists. What GANNI changes is the trim, and the company the print keeps.

The ruffles keep going underneath. A Ruffle-Trim Cropped Tank Top and a Ruffle-Trim Mid-Rise Tight 28 share the jacket’s leopard and espresso-pink colorways, which means the three can be worn as a matched set in either print. A Jacquard Mesh Tank Top adds a more technical texture, and the Ruffle-Trim Textured Midi Dress is the clearest signal that the collection intends to leave the gym altogether. Two Brushed Softstreme pieces, a Slouchy Pullover and a Barrel-Leg Pant, cover the slower end of the day, the hours after class rather than during it.

The fabric story belongs to lululemon. Nulu, the brand’s soft, four-way-stretch knit, took 18 months to develop and debuted in 2015 with the first Align tights, according to the company’s own history of that franchise. Softstreme, the brushed and heavier counterpart, does the lounge-leaning work here. GANNI supplied the visual vocabulary it has been refining for well over a decade: leopard, ruffle trims and color combinations that clash on purpose.

Then come the most literal nods to the brief. Leg warmers, boleros and headbands are dance-class staples closely tied to the era Reffstrup is citing, and here they sit in the line as accessories rather than costume. The announcement also lists footwear among the collection’s categories, although none of the launch materials published so far identify the shoe itself.

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Japan runs on its own calendar for this one. The collection arrives there on October 16, a day after the global launch, at lululemon’s Harajuku and Aoyama stores and its Japanese online store, and the Japanese assortment is limited to women’s apparel and accessories. Its yen pricing is also the most complete public price list for the collection so far. Both jackets sit at ¥24,800 each. The Ruffle-Trim Cropped Tank Top is ¥14,800 and the Jacquard Mesh Tank Top ¥15,800, while the Ruffle-Trim Mid-Rise Tight 28 comes in at ¥21,800. The Brushed Softstreme Barrel-Leg Pant is ¥25,800, the matching Slouchy Pullover ¥27,800, and the Ruffle-Trim Textured Midi Dress tops the list at ¥38,800. The joint announcement did not include dollar, pound or euro pricing.

The Harajuku address is new. lululemon opened its Harajuku global flagship on August 19, 2026, the brand’s first global flagship in Japan, at roughly 1,220 square meters in Jingumae. The store carries women’s, men’s and accessories, displays three artworks by Japan-based artists inspired by the surrounding neighborhood, and offers a personalization service, exclusive to the location, for embossing and engraving select accessories. The Vancouver company, founded in 1998, ran 13 stores in Japan when the flagship was announced in July. Harajuku caps a fast Japanese buildout that added a first Kansai flagship on Osaka’s Midosuji in autumn 2024, a large flagship in central Shibuya at the end of that year, a first Kyoto store in early 2026 and a Jingumae pop-up that spring to preview the Harajuku opening. GANNI x lululemon reaches the store less than two months after its doors opened.

 

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The campaign, “Joy Is a Power Move,” is built around a short film shot in a dance studio, where the line between rehearsal and show is deliberately blurred. The brands pitch it as the emotional charge of 1980s dance cinema played with present-day energy, with movement framed as a form of self-expression. Its casting carries the collection’s deepest reference.

Jennifer Beals became a star as Alex Owens in Flashdance, Adrian Lyne’s 1983 film about an 18-year-old who welds at a Pittsburgh steel mill by day, dances at night, and finally works up the nerve to audition for the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory. It became the third-highest-grossing film of 1983 in the United States, earned Beals a Golden Globe nomination, and left behind one of the decade’s most imitated looks in the wide-necked sweatshirt from its poster. Beals was 19 when it opened, and its theme, Irene Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling,” went to No. 1 on the US singles chart that May. In the launch announcement, Beals called it an honor to join a campaign about finding joy through movement, and said she has long been a customer of both labels.

Her co-star brings a different lineage. METTE, born Mette Towley in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1991, earned a dance degree in her home state and toured with Pharrell Williams’ dance troupe before her breakout as the featured dancer in the video for N.E.R.D and Rihanna’s “Lemon.” Film work followed in Hustlers, Cats and Barbie. Her music runs under the all-caps METTE name, from the 2023 EP METTENARRATIVE to an opening slot on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in London in June 2024. Fashion campaigns are familiar ground, too: her song “Mama’s Eyes” soundtracked Gap‘s Spring 2025 “Feels Like Gap” campaign, and she has kept releasing singles through 2026.

 

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Her launch statement is where the casting clicks into place. METTE said she has worn lululemon since dance school, that GANNI came into her life while she was working on a film in London, and that she grew up learning to weld from her father while holding on to the possibility of a big audition someday. A young welder waiting on an audition is, almost beat for beat, Alex Owens. METTE also described sharing a dance with Beals set to her own music, though the track has not been named in launch materials.

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GANNI did not begin life as a print-and-ruffle label. Gallerist Frans Truelsen founded it in 2000 as a cashmere line, and it stayed small until 2009, when Ditte and Nicolaj Reffstrup took it over, Ditte as creative director and Nicolaj as chief executive. Ditte had come up through retail, training at a Danish fashion house and buying for Copenhagen boutiques, and her rule from the start was to make only what she and her team would want to wear themselves. In her fall 2023 show notes she put the attitude more bluntly, writing that GANNI “will never be a grey turtleneck.” Private equity firm L Catterton acquired a 51 percent stake in 2017, and GANNI’s show became one of the most watched slots on the Copenhagen calendar.

The sportswear crossover has mostly happened at ground level, through New Balance shoe. The partnership began in 2022 with a GANNI-lettered 2002R, returned in August 2023 with two colorways of the 1906R, Egret and Blazing Yellow, plus a black-and-yellow RC30 first shown on GANNI’s spring 2024 runway in Copenhagen, and came back in September 2025 with the 1906L, New Balance’s runner-loafer hybrid, finished in GANNI’s snakeskin print with a metal butterfly logo on the strap. That pair retailed for $190 in the US and reached Japan on October 24, 2025, at ¥30,250 through New Balance’s own stores.

The lululemon project changes the scale of that relationship with sport. The New Balance work lived at the end of the leg, one silhouette at a time. This collection puts GANNI’s codes on jackets, tanks, tights and dresses, in fabrics engineered for movement, sold through a performance brand’s own stores on three continents.

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The calendar matters on the other side of the deal, too. Heidi O’Neill took over as lululemon’s chief executive on September 8, 2026, after more than 25 years at Nike, where she was most recently president of consumer, product and brand, ending a stretch of interim co-leadership that followed Calvin McDonald’s exit as CEO in January. Her appointment came after months of public criticism of the board from founder Chip Wilson, the company’s largest shareholder, who argued there was a disconnect between lululemon’s creative direction and the board’s oversight. Coverage of the hire also pointed to recent product missteps and tougher competition across premium activewear. The business itself was still growing: net revenue rose 5 percent to $11.1 billion for the fiscal year ended February 1, 2026, with international markets supplying double-digit growth.

When her hire was announced in April, O’Neill said her job would be to accelerate product breakthroughs, deepen the brand’s cultural relevance and unlock growth in markets around the world. The GANNI collection lands about five weeks into her tenure, and its ingredients (a Copenhagen fashion name, a campaign rooted in film history and a rollout running from North America to Harajuku) sit squarely within that stated agenda.

Online, the collection goes live October 15 at lululemon.com and GANNI.com. In Tokyo, the Harajuku flagship and the Aoyama store put it on the floor one day later.