Table of Contents
- Key Highlights
- Introduction
- A gym rearranged: staging, sound, and the scripted invitation
- Designing sweat: material choices and the aesthetics of discomfort
- Choreography as critique: movement, equipment, and the body-in-training
- Spectatorship, consent, and the politics of participation
- The language of announcement: voice, commands, and the scripting of behavior
- Fashion history and theatricality: precedents and departures
- The politics of objectification: feminist frames and disciplinary power
- Sweat as commodity: the commercialization of effort
- What the performance reveals about spectatorship and the modern gaze
- Broader cultural currents: where fashion, fitness, and performance meet
- After the catwalk: implications for designers, gyms, and cultural critics
- FAQ
Key Highlights
- CATWALK Collective’s one-off "CATSWEAT" performance turned a Reykjavik gym into a staged runway, using latex, sound, and choreographed movement to interrogate fitness culture, embodiment, and objectification.
- The piece blended fashion show tropes with immersive performance: the audience was invited to participate, the gym equipment became props, and the production framed sweat as both aesthetic and mode of social discipline.
Introduction
The gym reproduces a set of expectations about bodies: how they move, what they should look like, and how effort is visibly rewarded. For an evening in May, the World Class Laugar gym in Reykjavik stopped being a place for private exertion and became a public theatre. Models stretched and cycled under a looping recorded voice that invited—and subtly coerced—the few early arrivals to "sweat with us" and "Please watch. Can you see me?" The invitation was earnest and ambiguous. It asked the audience to perform a new kind of looking: not a glance at a fleeting outfit on a runway, but an active experience of the body at work.
"CATSWEAT," created by CATWALK Collective and featuring the latex "sweat collection" by artist Diana Burkot, staged that ambiguity. It collapsed the distance between discipline and display, athleticism and ornament, private effort and public object. What unfolded over the course of the performance revealed as much about modern fitness culture as it did about contemporary fashion theater: sweat was not simply biological output; it was turned into a material, a motif, and a mode of persuasion.
This account reconstructs the performance and reads it against broader cultural patterns—fashion's theatrical past, the rise of athleisure, critical theories of objectification and bodily discipline, and the mechanics of immersive spectacle. It examines the choices—sound, costume, choreography, spatial staging—that made a gym suddenly legible as a catwalk, and it asks what it means when training the body becomes a spectacle to be watched, instructed, and judged.
A gym rearranged: staging, sound, and the scripted invitation
Walking into World Class Laugar five minutes ahead of the scheduled start meant encountering an unusual stillness. In the low light, models moved like actors preparing for a scene, stretching and adjusting. A recorded voice filled the space, equal parts announcement and provocation: "Welcome, you are now part of the catwalk." The voice did more than label the event. It established a script.
Staging a fashion performance inside an active gym forces a reorientation of typical cues. A conventional runway has a clear line of sight, a cleared aisle, and a familiar ritual: expectant silence, a model’s presence, applause. CATWALK Collective inverted many of those expectations. Equipment remained in place. The machines, benches, and bikes, ordinarily instruments of private practice, became set pieces and props. The audience, initially small and tentative, clustered at the margins as black coats contrasted with latex-clad figures and rubber floors. That contrast—between outerwear and workout wear, between dry coats and sweating bodies—made a visual point before a single model took a confident stride.
The voice on the speaker framed the audience's role with repeated commands: "Feel free. Feel free. Feel free." Repetition served to unsettle rather than reassure. The imperative "feel free" was less a grant of permission than a test of boundaries. Nobody in the audience took the offer literally at first. The general reluctance suggested that freedom of action is conditioned by social protocols: the gym is a personal space, and the fashion show is a public ritual with standardized behavior. Crossing either boundary is awkward.
When a friend of the collective, Yulia, circulated through the audience encouraging movement, the choreography shifted from staged presentation to participatory event. The models rearranged weight benches into a makeshift runway. The soundscape—initially ethereal—slid into electronic beats. The visual and sonic changes signaled that the performance would follow a dramaturgy of build and release: slow assembly, a confident walk, then acceleration into chaos. The moment when an audience member compared the latex sheets to "overcooked pasta" offered a terse interpretation: the aesthetics of sweat had been literally fashioned into clothing, and the results were visceral.
Sound functioned like a director, dictating tempo and mood. The recorded announcements gave instruction and context. The music provided rhythm for motion. The combination guided the audience’s attention away from conventional fashion cues and toward the embodied labor of training. When a line resonated—"We are now preparing our bodies to be objectified"—it landed as a paradoxical thesis: the show both staged and critiqued objectification, and it did so by putting bodies on display while simultaneously foregrounding the conditioning that leads to that display.
Designing sweat: material choices and the aesthetics of discomfort
Latex served as the primary material for Diana Burkot’s "sweat collection." At first glance it suggested glamour: glossy, reflective, packaged. Look closer and the design intentionally unsettled. Uneven sheets of yellow, brown, and white adhered to the surface, textures that prompted associations with bodily discharge—snot, dead skin—or with something less grotesque but equally domestic, like overcooked pasta. The ambiguity mattered. The costume made sweat itself legible as a surface treatment.
Latex is inherently non-breathable, which makes it an impractical choice for high-intensity exercise. That practical objection, however, misses the point. The garments were never designed for performance comfort. Their purpose was rhetorical. They translated bodily effusion into a visual grammar, making sweat into ornament, barrier, and sign.
Fashion has a long history of converting inconvenient or uncomfortable materiality into statements. Corsets once constrained breathing; high heels reoriented balance; garments can be instruments of both empowerment and restriction. In that lineage, latex becomes a literalized metaphor: a skin over skin, manufactured sheen over biological sheen. The clothing highlighted labor and its consequences. Sweat, normally a private sign of exertion, was amplified and stylized.
Design choices also played with ideas of value and disgust. The colors and textures presented a tension between attraction and repulsion. Glittering elements promised glamour; sticky or discolored patches evoked bodily residue. That tension echoes larger cultural negotiations around bodies: they are simultaneously commodities and abject matter. The models wore garments that made it possible to read the body as product and waste at once.
Real-world design trends show similar convergences. The rise of "athleisure" turned workout garments into streetwear and signaled a broader cultural move toward normalizing exercise aesthetics in public. Brands like Lululemon and Gymshark have commodified sweat-adjacent silhouettes—tight leggings, compression tops—that are comfortable and presentable. CATWALK's choice to render sweat as latex intervened in that conversation. Instead of normalizing sweat as stylish, the performance accentuated its role as evidence of bodily labor and vulnerability.
Choreography as critique: movement, equipment, and the body-in-training
The models’ movement deliberately occupied a spectrum of states: confident striding, strained effort, mechanical repetition. One model slung a dumbbell over a shoulder and walked as if carrying weight were an accessory. Another struggled to run with the same dumbbell, hands swinging narrowly above the floor. Hula hoops, red dodgeballs, yoga mats—ordinary gym apparatus—were used as props in unexpected positions. Bikes, used at the conclusion to generate wind in models’ hair, created an effect more associated with fashion photography than athletic training.
That choreography suggested stages in the disciplining of the body: initiation, mastery, and performance. At the outset, repetition and control suggest practice. Then, trained movements become stylized gestures, presented deliberately to attract attention. The sequence in which the runway was abandoned and models dispersed across the room to perform simultaneous exercises brought the training process into relief. The young bodies, synchronized and in motion, became a study in how bodies are shaped to meet social expectations of appearance and endurance.
The performance also navigated vulnerability. Exercise often reveals physical effort—heavy breathing, facial strain, perspiration. Fashion presentation traditionally erases or conceals exertion. Models are expected to look effortless while performing an act that requires control. CATWALK inverted that expectation: exertion was not hidden, it was highlighted. The voice instructed preparation for objectification, and the choreography showed how objectification is produced through disciplined practice.
The final moments—models running in circles then sprinting out the door—were cinematic and abrupt. They converted the gym from a controlled interior into an exit toward an unspecified elsewhere. The shouting—"Weights! Bar!"—and the sudden emptiness of the room amounted to a form of catharsis. The performance did not resolve its tensions so much as stage them and then leave the audience with a silent room, a void filled only by the memory of orchestrated motion.
Spectatorship, consent, and the politics of participation
Audience behavior became a theme in its own right. The recorded voice's repeated invitations and the initial reluctance to participate made visible the tacit rules that regulate public spaces. People stood at the edge of the action, watching in a sort of agreed-upon reserve. When the collective asked the audience to do more than look—to use machines, to circulate—they weren't simply seeking bodies to fill a set piece. They were testing the conditions under which spectatorship becomes participation.
Participation raises ethical questions. Were audience members truly free to step into the workout? Social inhibition and spatial norms create a barrier that feels like consent. Many gym users treat equipment and space as personal; crossing into someone else's exercise zone can be invasive. The performance asked the audience to break that norm, which made the request unsettling. Yulia's gentle prompting allowed the social script to be rewritten for a moment, but the shift was fragile.
Consent also matters in the direction taken by the models. The announcement "We are now preparing our bodies to be objectified" positions objectification as an outcome of voluntary action. That raises a paradox: can objectification be both imposed and desired? For some, working toward an idealized body is a personal project; for others, that project is shaped by external pressures—advertising, media, social feedback. The performance captured this tension by emphasizing both choice and compulsion.
Spectatorship in the piece functioned like a mirror for contemporary culture. Social media platforms have turned spectatorship into a participatory practice: likes, comments, and shares quantify attention and reward bodies that conform to norms. Fitness culture has its own economies of attention. "Fitspiration" images circulate models and influencers performing idealized workouts, their physical accomplishments and appearances monetized. CATWALK rendered the mechanics of that exchange visible. It showed how bodies are prepared—through repetition, choreography, and costume—to enter economies of attention where objectification can be both currency and harm.
The language of announcement: voice, commands, and the scripting of behavior
Sound design in CATSWEAT deserves specific attention. The recorded voice functioned as a narrator, instructor, and authority figure. Its lines were short, declarative, and sometimes paradoxical: "We are now preparing our bodies to be objectified." That language names the process explicitly, refusing to hide the ideological labor at play.
The voice used imperatives—"Feel free"—which created a dissonance: a command couched in an offer of liberty. Repetition intensified the tension. When commands are repeated, the effect is less liberatory and more directive, as if insistence reveals an underlying uncertainty. The instruction to use machines and to walk around the space alternated between invitation and pressure.
The voice also staged the end of the event with bureaucratic clarity: "Thank you for participating in the catwalk, you may leave. Stop watching. Now the catwalk has ended." The abruptness of that closure brought into relief the temporality of spectacle. Fashion shows have their rituals of opening and closing; here, a performance that asked the audience to shift their behavior also dictated when that behavior should cease.
The voice’s role aligned the gym with other institutional spaces where behavior is regulated by announcements: airports, schools, and museums. It underlined how instructions shape bodies in public. In the gym, signage about proper use of equipment, class times, and etiquette coexists with normative scripts about what counts as acceptable effort and display. By turning instruction into spectacle, CATWALK made those norms audible and subject to critique.
Fashion history and theatricality: precedents and departures
Fashion has cultivated spectacle for centuries. Designers have used theatrical staging to augment or overthrow the clothes themselves. Alexander McQueen famously staged elaborate runway events that merged fashion with performance art; the runway became a stage for narrative, shock, and affect. Those precedents matter because CATWALK Collective inherits a tradition in which the runway is not merely a practical means of presenting clothes but a medium for commentary.
Performance art, too, provides a lineage. Marina Abramović’s "The Artist Is Present" transformed the gallery into a space of tightly-managed relational exchange, where the audience’s proximity and gaze became part of the work. CATWALK’s use of audience prompting and the blending of artifact (clothing) and action (exercise) resonates with that relational turn. But where much fashion theater aims to produce glamour and desire, CATSWEAT deliberately foregrounded discomfort and the mechanics of training.
Unconventional runways—shows staged in warehouses, rooftops, and virtual forums—have eroded the primacy of the white-box fashion runway. CATWALK’s decision to stage a show in an active gym aligns with that broader move: shoehorning fashion into everyday spaces invites new readings. A gym is a charged site. It is secular, routine, and intimate in its demands. Placing fashion there invited the audience to consider the social and political meanings of bodily effort.
The performance both drew from and diverged from theatrical fashion precedents. It used sound, staging, and spectacle, but it did so to defamiliarize rather than amplify glamour. The result was closer to a political provocation than a marketing event. It asked viewers to see the conditions of objectification rather than to gaze in passive admiration.
The politics of objectification: feminist frames and disciplinary power
The line that announced preparation for objectification invoked theoretical conversations about the gaze, agency, and social power. Objectification happens when a person’s body is treated as an object for consumption. Feminist scholars have long noted how media and social institutions produce norms that define worth in relation to physical appearance. Gyms are implicated in that production: they are spaces where individuals are encouraged—through classes, trainers, and advertising—to mold bodies toward socially-coveted shapes.
The performance complicated simple dichotomies of agency versus oppression. The models were active participants who practiced movements and wore the clothes; yet the language of discipline hinted at external demands. Michel Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power provide a useful lens here. Discipline trains bodies through repetition, observation, and normalization. Fitness culture organizes time (class schedules), space (arranged machines), and surveillance (trainers, mirrors, cameras) to create disciplined subjects. CATWALK depicted those mechanisms by turning practice into spectacle.
At the same time, feminist critiques about the "male gaze" remain relevant. Laura Mulvey’s argument—originally framed in cinematic terms—describes how visual media position viewers to derive pleasure from looking at bodies as objects. The catwalk amplifies that dynamic: models are arranged for the viewer's gaze. Yet CATSWEAT named the process and made it visible: the models trained so that they could be looked at. That explicitness did not abolish objectification but reframed it as manufactured, not intrinsic.
Discussion of consent returns in this frame. When models prepare their bodies for objectification, are they consenting to being objectified, or are they responding to a market that leaves limited options for agency? The performance resisted offering easy answers. It rather staged a condition—the feedback loop between training, exhibition, and evaluation—that requires critical attention.
Sweat as commodity: the commercialization of effort
Sweat has become a signifier of authenticity and commitment in contemporary culture. Social media valorizes evidence of hard work: "sweat selfies" and post-workout photos idealize tiredness as virtuous. Fitness influencers monetize their routines, turning bodily labor into content. Clothing brands capitalize on that authenticity by selling apparel that both facilitates movement and communicates a lifestyle.
CATWALK’s literalization of sweat turned that commodity into aesthetic material. By rendering perspiration as designed latex sheets and embellishments, the performance dramatized how bodily labor is packaged and resold back to audiences. The spectacle suggested that sweat itself has exchange value: it signals discipline, aestheticizes pain, and markets identity.
Such commodification carries consequences. When sweat becomes a currency of worth, it creates hierarchies of acceptable pain and reward. Not everyone has equal access to resources that make disciplined bodies possible—time, money, training, and coaching. The performance hinted at those inequalities by staging the labor of discipline without guaranteeing its social return.
Brands have long exploited these dynamics. Athleisure normalized comfortable, workout-ready dress while reframing fitness as a lifestyle accessible to anyone with the right gear. Influencers sell both aspiration and technique. CATWALK, by contrast, refused the polish of commercial imagery. Its costumes and staging exposed the labor that commercial images often smooth over.
What the performance reveals about spectatorship and the modern gaze
A core effect of CATSWEAT was to make spectatorship itself a subject of inspection. The audience's initial reserve, the later movement prompted by a member of the collective, and the final instruction to "stop watching" together mapped a social choreography of observation. Spectatorship is not passive; it is regulated by etiquette, power, and expectation.
Modern life distributes attention in a market-like fashion. Visibility yields value. Fashion, social media, and fitness industries compete for attention by staging bodies in ways that make them legible and desirable. CATWALK forced the audience to confront that engine. Watching turned into a moral choice: to reinforce the spectacle by giving attention or to withhold.
The show also prompted reflection on public intimacy. Gyms are semi-public spaces where exposure is normalized in a controlled way. The performance pushed that exposure into deliberate display. That created discomfort for the audience and offered an opportunity to reassess norms about what it means to watch someone exert themselves.
Finally, the instruction to leave—"Thank you for participating in the catwalk, you may leave"—functioned like an administrative seal, returning observers to the routines of everyday life. The closure emphasized the staged, time-bound nature of spectacle and reminded viewers that the social logics they had witnessed would persist outside the gym.
Broader cultural currents: where fashion, fitness, and performance meet
CATSWEAT sat at an intersection of cultural trends. Athleisure blurred the line between exercise wear and everyday dress. Runways increasingly sought unconventional venues to generate media attention and to critique production. Performance art integrated audience relations and institutional critique. CATWALK drew on these currents while carving its own space.
The performance also tapped into a deeper cultural interest in authenticity. Sweat signals real work. Fashion often attempts to look effortless. When the two collide, as they did here, the result is a complex message about labor and image. The models’ physical exertion undermined the pretense of "effortless beauty" even as the costumes stylized that exertion.
Public conversations about body positivity and inclusivity provided a contrasting backdrop. Movements advocating for diverse representations of bodies have challenged narrow beauty standards. CATSWEAT entered that conversation not by offering celebratory inclusion but by interrogating the systems that demand conformity. Its critique was structural rather than affirmative. It asked audiences to consider why bodies are made to conform and what is lost in the process.
Performance-based interventions like CATSWEAT are valuable precisely because they complicate simple narratives. Where advertising often sells tidy solutions—work harder, buy the right gear—this kind of work surfaces contradictions and invites reflection.
After the catwalk: implications for designers, gyms, and cultural critics
For designers, the performance underscores the power of context. Clothing takes on different meanings depending on where it appears. A garment staged in a boutique functions differently in a gym. Designers who wish to engage critique might consider how site-specific presentations can reveal or subvert the social life of garments.
Gyms and fitness brands may take away an awareness of how training is staged and consumed. Facilities that aim to be inclusive might evaluate whether their spatial arrangements, signage, and class formats promote healthy participation or contribute to spectator economies that valorize certain bodies over others.
Cultural critics and scholars can use instances like CATSWEAT to study how attention economies operate across industries. The event connected fashion, performance, and fitness into a single spectacle, offering a compact case for analyzing how bodies are disciplined, displayed, and commodified.
Finally, audiences—the public—can take what the performance made visible and use it as a prompt. The experience highlighted an ethical question: how do we watch without reinforcing harmful norms? Engaged spectatorship requires reflection on the consequences of attention and on the systems that prize certain bodies and practices over others.
FAQ
Q: What was the main concept behind CATWALK Collective’s "CATSWEAT" performance? A: The performance examined the relationship between exercise and display by staging a fashion show inside a gym. It used latex costumes styled with sweat-like textures, choreographed movement, and recorded voice prompts to critique how fitness culture disciplines bodies for public consumption and objectification.
Q: Why was latex chosen for the "sweat collection"? Was the clothing functional? A: Latex was a rhetorical choice. Its non-breathable quality and shiny surface accentuated bodily sheen and discomfort, transforming sweat into a visible, sculptural element. The garments were not designed for practical exercise; they were designed to make sweat legible as both material and metaphor.
Q: How did the performance engage the audience? A: The performance used recorded instructions to invite audience participation and to challenge social norms that separate spectator and participant. A member of the collective encouraged movement among attendees, and models used gym equipment as props. The voice alternated between invitation and command, prompting the audience to reflect on their role as watchers.
Q: Was the performance promoting or critiquing objectification? A: It staged both. By announcing "We are now preparing our bodies to be objectified," the performance named objectification as an outcome of training and social pressure. It neither fully condemned nor fully endorsed the process but instead made visible the mechanisms—discipline, repetition, costume—that produce bodies for the gaze.
Q: How does this performance fit into broader trends in fashion and performance? A: CATSWEAT fits within a lineage of theatrical fashion shows and performance art that use spectacle and site-specific staging to comment on cultural practices. It also intersects with the athleisure trend and the commercialization of fitness by highlighting how physical labor is packaged as style and authenticity.
Q: What were the ethical considerations about involving the audience? A: The piece raised questions about consent and the social norms that inhibit or permit participation. While the collective invited spectators to engage, social etiquette and personal privacy in gym spaces complicated the invitation. The performance used these tensions intentionally to make the audience reflect on their role.
Q: What should designers or gyms learn from such a performance? A: Design presentations are shaped by context; staging can reveal or subvert a garment’s social meaning. Gyms and brands might consider how their spaces and messaging either democratize fitness or contribute to narrow standards that prioritize appearance over wellbeing.
Q: Does the performance have implications for conversations about inclusivity and body positivity? A: Yes. CATSWEAT emphasized the structural mechanisms that shape bodies rather than offering a celebratory depiction of diverse bodies. It redirected attention to the pressures and economies that enforce conformity, suggesting that meaningful inclusivity requires systemic changes beyond representation alone.
Q: Where can people learn more about CATWALK Collective and the "sweat collection"? A: The performance was part of DesignMarch at World Class Laugar in Reykjavik. For interviews or additional coverage, local cultural outlets and the collective’s own communications typically provide further context and statements about their artistic intent.
