Running Order Is a Futuristic Activewear Brand You Should Have on Your Radar

The pseudononymous designer behind it is someone who's made a lot of the cool sh*t that everyone's wearing.

Welcome to HEAVIES, a modern and spiritual Substack about health and wellness.

Photos by Jack Hare (Courtesy of Running Order)

Housekeeping:

• HEAVIES is officially a featured Substack publication! All my gratitude to Laura Reilly, the writer and elite tastemaker behind Magasin, for the loveliest endorsement. <3

• Two weeks ago I spent an afternoon at MOCEAN physical therapy near Grand Central and strolled out feeling 15 years younger. What I love about MOCEAN—which was founded by Dr. Josh Park, medical director of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang—is that treatment there combines cutting-edge tech backed by research (like PEMF therapy) with Eastern healing modalities (like acupuncture and cupping). Extremely HEAVIES coded. I’m going to do a bigger piece on what Josh is building soon, but please know it’s probably my favorite place in New York City, after my gym.

On a hot and sweaty Sunday morning not too long ago, I met up with the pseudonymous designer Heaven Li at La Cabra in Soho, their old stomping grounds. I was excited to talk to them about their five-year old brand, Running Order, one of the coolest and most exciting new ideas I’ve come across in some time: “rave wear” that blurs old distinctions between functionality and style and gender and what it means to move around. 

Heaven—not their real name—is a high-level designer at one of the big brands that menswear guys all love (including myself), and their resume is unimpeachable, having worked across a wide spectrum of luxury ready-to-wear and technical outdoor apparel. Which is all to say: Heaven is crazy talented. (And here is where I’d normally devote a few sentences of description to how cool they look, but I won’t be doing that to protect their identity lol.) Outside of their day job, among wearing many other hats, Heaven is also an ultramarathoner and club demon, both of which inform the fundamental ideas behind Running Order: that this is stylish activewear you’ll (1) look hot in, and (2) is versatile enough that you can go from the gym to the club and dance until 4 a.m. 

As an appreciator of advanced fabrics, someone who’s gone deep into the world of technical outerwear, let me tell you: there’s something special about RO. The photos don’t do the tiny, imperceptible details justice, from the articulation in the joints to the way it seems to cling and hang in all the right places. I’ve been wearing the clothes all summer, and Heaven seems to intrinsically understand how the body kinesthetically interacts with material, and vice versa. Running Order does that special thing that all the best brands do: When you wear the clothes, they seem to expand what you, the wearer, are capable of doing. They grant your body extra agency. It feels futuristic in that way; small wonder that Dover Street Market is one of the few places that carries it.

The idea for Running Order (the name is more of a playlist reference vs. anything running-specific) came to Heaven pre-pandemic, when they were working long hours at a design job in Soho, logging out at 10 or 11 or 12 every night. “As I started going to the gym more and more, I was struggling to find sportswear that both functioned while representing my own personal identity, interests, or aesthetics,” says Heaven. “Why isn't there athletic apparel that expresses who you are in the same way that you choose your tattoos, shoes, piercings, or hair? Why does everything break or rip after one to two wears? Why is everything so gendered?”  

Heaven partied a lot, both in Berlin and New York—the two spiritual homes of RO. Long nights at impossible doors like Berghain. Parties like Club SHADE, Fade to Mind, Night Slugs, GHE20G0TH1K, Unter. “I started doing a lot of drugs, back to back nights, rolling straight into work from the party still high or coming down,” says Heaven. After a few years, they decided to get sober.

“I knew that taking ecstasy, molly, and speed every weekend wasn't sustainable. But I loved techno too much to give up the clubs. I'm a lifer: I want to be the old gay guys you see inside of Berghain. I want to be 60 and still dancing.” 

Heaven was rolling into parties wearing long-sleeve compression Nike bodysuits and Doc Martens with heels, and “quickly learned the error of my ways after dancing for hours on end.” They soon switched to sneakers. “My feet are eternally grateful after anywhere from 50 to 100k steps in a single night.”  

Around 2019, Heaven started to take running seriously. “My friend Tilly somehow convinced me to start waking up at 5:30 a.m. to trek from Bushwick to Soho so that we could run at 7 a.m. before work… I had never run more than 10 miles continuously before, and here I was being asked to run multiple times in a day, without sleep.” 

“It was also my first experience of what it was like to be a part of a team,” they add. 

“It's the community aspect of running that ‘made it’ for me. When you're with others, you forget about the repetition, the distance, the toiling and suffering you feel when you're alone.” It isn’t too different from finding communion in the club.

That Running Order as a brand is difficult to categorize—it’s not a  pure running brand by any stretch, like Satisfy—speaks to how cutting edge it is. Heaven will reveal themselves in due time, but until then, the category that the brand is attempting to inhabit literally does not exist, an endeavor that takes creativity, imagination, and more than a little conviction—things that fashion as a whole could use a lot more of. Running Order is literally carving out a new space for itself. What’s more future than that?

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