You could call it "base camp" fashion. Walk down any city-centre street any day and you'll pass hundreds of people wearing brightly coloured thermal fleeces, hightech rainwear and sturdy and expensive Gortex walking boots. It's not that suddenly a large percentage of the population has turned into Dawson Stelfox wannabes; it's just one of the many ways in which sport has become a central part of contemporary life, and it goes a long way towards explaining why a major exhibition of sports design opened earlier this month in Glasgow.
The Scottish city is the 1999 UK Capital of Architecture and Design, and Winning: The Design of Sports is the first major show in an exhibition calendar that includes shows on Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Alto, Alexander "Greek" Thompson, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
"When Glasgow won the competition to become UK capital of Architecture and Design, the brief was quite clear," says its director Deyan Sudjic. "We had to take design out of a professional ghetto and show how it is part of everyday living." The exhibition on sports will be followed later in the year by equally accessible ones on food and on the home. Certainly for the next three months, the McLellan Gallery in Glasgow will be noisier than usual. A strip of Astroturf covers its long narrow entrance hall and - to complete that Wembley feeling - a sound system blares out crowd noises. Along the bright orange walls are graphic images created for the exhibition by Spanish graphic designer Javier Mariscal, who shot to worldwide attention with Cobi, his logo for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
Inside the main gallery the dimly lit interconnecting exhibition halls are filled with giant white orbs with one side scooped out. They are made of thin metal sheeting and were designed by avant-garde designer Ron Arad as the best way to display a huge variety of sporting equipment - from skateboards to Formula One drivers' suits, fencing masks to mountain bikes. "We were conscious that although we were designing a popular show, the design of the show itself was really important," says Sudjic. "By putting them in these giant balls, as well as being a witty sporting reference, we were able to control the objects and to group them together."
As well as the innovative and attention-grabbing exhibition design, what saves the entire show from looking like an upmarket sports-equipment hypermarket is the captions, which clearly show the role design has to play in the development of sport. In the 1950s, Formula One drivers wore dickie bows and short sleeves. Twenty years later, flame-retardant suits were made compulsory and now they're made of Kevlar, a fabric developed for space suits. In sport, the exhibition stresses again and again, design really does follow function. The suits are flame retardant for 12 seconds, exactly the amount of time it takes the emergency services to get to a crashed driver. The one-piece suits look so sleek because they have no exposed seams - seams would be the first thing to catch fire in a pile-up. Similarly, a set of tennis racquets dating from the turn of the century to the present day, titanium high-performance models, shows clearly how tennis has evolved from being a pleasant serve-and-volley spectator sport into a serve-only sport that is fast losing its popular appeal.
In the past few years in particular, fashion and sport have become inextricably intertwined. One vast hall in the show is given over entirely to trainers, the footwear of choice for one in five Americans who, a study has shown, don't wear or buy them for the purpose they were designed. These most visible sports items most clearly show what Deyan Sudjic sees as the "creative collision between popular culture and the technical and aesthetic skills of the designer". Clearly the vast majority of people who buy trainers - in the UK alone last year they accounted for 18 per cent of all shoe sales - buy them not because of their superior ergonomics on the track. Similarly, high performance doesn't demand day-glo colour or heavy branding. When Micheal Johnson opted to wear his famous gold Nikes in the final at the Atlanta Olympics, he was giving a clear signal not to his feet but to his competitors. If he hadn't actually won the gold medal, his choice of footwear would have been more than a little embarrassing.
The fashion industry now has a recognised category "sportswear". It's the biggest single growth area, with the Tommy Hilfiger brand leading the way. This is the biggest single label in the US, and last year sales reached $1.3 billion wholesale. Nothing in the Hilfiger range is unique but he mixes conservative, preppy styles with street-cred-rapper-inspired shapes and colours to make the label popular with all races and socio-economic levels. It's a far cry from the first "sportswear" launch by Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their look was typified by navy, crested blazers, chinos or white trousers, and white deck shoes, and owed much to a vision of English, upper-class pursuits.
SPORTS design is even having an influence at the upper end of the fashion scale. Last season, Prada featured hooded tops in gabardine - sweatshirt-style - while Jil Sander opted for that sportswear staple, Velcro, as a fastening. Even the most amateur of sportspeople are now technoscenti when it comes to the equipment they buy, and that is all down to the design. We expect technology to give us the edge. Can't hit the ball far enough on the eight? Well there must be a golf club that would greatly help matters. Rollerblading a little on sluggish side? Change to better wheels.
In sport as in no other area, design is the great signifier, promoting ever-changing subcultures. One giant white orb is filled with skateboards, none of which differs dramatically from another, but all of which look radically different thanks to their graphic detailing and paint colours. In the skateboarding world, a design has a "cool life" of one month before the next must-have image is drawn up.
In Glasgow, the organisers of the year's architecture and design calendar have been creative in their choice of exhibition venues, which range from the old fruit market to building new venues, such as the ambitious project to transform one of Charles Renne Mackintosh's buildings into a multifunctional gallery. So they did not have to locate the sports exhibition in a conventional art gallery. But, as Deyan Sudjic says: "The most expensive corner of the show has a Formula One sports car. It was borrowed from a collector and it's insured for £2 million, which shows that sports design can be as expensive as art any day."