On a recent grey London morning, I arrived at Surrenne, a private members\u2019 gym beneath the lavish Berkeley hotel, that serves as the London studio for Tracy Anderson, fitness luminary and icon of the new (and very old) female beauty standard \u2014 think carved, hollow, and busty.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Inside, the air was thick and immaculate, heated to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (\u201cNYC temp,\u201d they told me, \u201cthe LA class is even hotter\u201d). The teacher was not Anderson, but a smiling Spanish man named Javi. \u201cNo talking,\u201d he said, citing the first rule of Tracy World. \u201cJust music.\u201d We began, and he adopted Anderson\u2019s uncanny-valley grimace. Movements started with small arm pulses, before escalating into kicks and angular twists. To the uninitiated, the signature Anderson method might look something like a jacked-up combination of Pilates and dance, but from within, it is one woman\u2019s unique and vast accomplishment, a sprawling universe of moves (more than 200,000 in Anderson\u2019s library) and routines that comes complete with a creation myth, esoterica, and, of course, merch.<\/p>\n
Halfway through, I was drenched. The middle-aged woman beside me, with an enviable six-pack and sparkling gold jewellery, smiled when I asked her after class how long she\u2019d been doing it. \u201cThree months?\u201d she ventured. Javi laughed. \u201cYou\u2019ve been here a year!\u201d Time, it turns out, works differently here.<\/p>\n
Anderson leads a cult-like empire that frames its offering as more than just a workout. To practice her method is to change your life \u2014 it is, as she proclaims, \u201crevolutionary.\u201d Women like me answer her siren call in droves. Hers is the lingo of gentle space, physical truth, creation, purpose, aura, passion, empowerment, and personal transformation. Those of us seeking these things \u2014 plus a closer conformity to that beauty standard \u2014 have made her $100 million dollars so far, cementing her cultural position with the liberal rich and making her rich-rich in the bargain. Men across the Hamptons wear T-shirts that say \u2018MY WIFE IS AT TRACY.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
Online, Anderson reaches far beyond the 1%, connecting to more than a million followers on Instagram. She has a subscription \u201conline studio,\u201d a kind of mini-Netflix of fitness through which you can tune into her live classes or do them on demand. Her p.r. team wouldn\u2019t tell me how many people take her classes \u2014 but the more than 15 million on TikTok who have posted<\/a> videos doing her workouts would indicate the number is high. She first came to fame as Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s trainer, and offers a similar brand of aspirational wellness as the actress. But Anderson\u2019s has an edge: exercise has become a luxury product, necessary for self-worth and available only to those who can afford it.\u00a0<\/p>\n The cult of exercise and its promise of personal magnificence are not new. The German-born Joseph Pilates rebelliously invented the choreography that became the global Pilates industry during his internment in England during World War I. About 40 years later, across the world in California, the perverted yogi Bikram Choudhury exported his heated sequence to the West, spawning a proliferation of hot-yoga studios and a culture of sweating it out in sweltering rooms. Both promised their exercise was not just to make you look good \u2014 it was to heal you.\u00a0<\/p>\n With the rise of a new crop of female fitness gurus, the tenor of the promises changed. After escaping the Nazis in Germany, Lotte Berk invented ballet barre and opened a studio in London in 1959, to strengthen, \u201cwithout adding bulk.\u201d In the 1960s, women \u2014 always the target audience of these fitness figures \u2014 were gaining sexual and financial freedom, and were discovering that the freedom to do with your body as you pleased meant that the practical activity of losing weight might become a kind of leisure hobby. Huge industries were born. Blond Californian Jacki Sorenson invented \u201caerobic dance\u201d in the late 1960s, soon to be known everywhere as aerobics. By the 1980s, the \u201cJane Fonda\u2019s Workout\u201d videos were popularizing the term \u201cfeel the burn\u201d and funding Fonda\u2019s political activism by promising women they could \u201cburn off fat<\/a>\u201d and find \u201cenergy for living.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s different about Tracy is not just that she combines the promise of transcendence with weight loss, but that she has harnessed the immensity of the internet to do it. Her rise to stardom coincided with the two great forces: the flourishing of the fitness industry in the 2010s \u2014 it grew by 75%<\/a> mostly driven by women \u2014 and the burgeoning world of streaming services. The medium is the message, and Anderson\u2019s message was about to be everywhere. Women, her customers, were getting more money, too. In 2010, women controlled<\/a> an estimated $5 trillion in the United States. By 2023, that figure had risen to $10 trillion by conservative estimates; McKinsey projects $30 trillion by 2030.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Tracy World, the body is both temple and test, a site where moral character is performed through effort.\u201d<\/p>\n With women\u2019s growing financial power came a trap: we would find ever more things to spend money on. This was the era of #GirlBoss capitalism: Dior sold a $700 We Should All Be Feminists T-shirt, and Sheryl Sandberg wanted us to \u201clean in.\u201d Chelsea Clinton hosted a presidential fundraiser for Hillary at Soul Cycle, where classes run $40 a pop. Exercise studios proliferated.\u00a0<\/p>\n The high prices and turbo-charged clientele meant that the fitness offerings needed to promise more: it wasn\u2019t just that working out could make you look good or feel good anymore; it was that it could make you be good. Tracy\u2019s waist-trimming DVDs sold in the tens of thousands, and so she set up brick-and-mortar studios, which she could charge even more for. Buying into something was seen as moral participation. To pay was to believe.\u00a0<\/p>\n Through social media, millions could now see what Tracy did, what she wore, what music she liked or didn\u2019t. Her association with figures like Paltrow, Madonna, and J-Lo, all of whom she\u2019d trained, boosted her own status as a quasi-celebrity. As legend would have it, her fallout with Madonna was so bad no one is allowed to play her music in any TA studio. The fact that people spread such a legend mattered. Watchers formed parasocial relationships with her, enough that when she launched her online studio in 2015, they signed up from all across the world to watch her sweat daily. A subscription allows you not just a workout, but access to the \u201cTAMILY.\u201d And the workouts became an ever-more-expensive commitment. Anderson added \u201cheartstone weights,\u201d and bands, and \u201cpremier membership,\u201d and \u201csummer camp.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n