BARRINGTON, R.I., Oct. 24 (UPI) — Hundreds donned yoga pants and marched outside the Rhode Island home of a man whose newspaper letter criticized “mature” women for the “disturbing” fashion trend.
Alan Sorrentino, 63, of Barrington, was targeted by a flurry of criticism after he authored a letter to the editor in the Barrington Times lamenting that yoga pants “do nothing to compliment a women over 20 years old.”
“Like the mini-skirt, yoga pants can be adorable on children and young women who have the benefit of nature’s blessing of youth. However, on mature, adult women there is something bizarre and disturbing about the appearance they make in public. Maybe it’s the unforgiving perspective they provide, inappropriate for general consumption, TMI, or the [specter] of someone coping poorly with their weight or advancing age that makes yoga pants so weird in public,” he wrote.
The letter inspired Jamie Burke to organize Sunday afternoon’s Yoga Pants Parade, which saw an estimated 400 women — as well as some men — donning their yoga pants and walking a route that took them directly past Sorrentino’s house.
Burke told the Boston Globe the parade was a “positive response to casual sexism.”
“This is way more than yoga pants. It is women fed up with the policing of our wardrobes and our bodies,” Burke told WJAR-TV.
Sorrentino said the letter was meant to be a joke.
“I assumed the character of this grumpy old man that was railing about women in yoga pants because he was too tight to just relax and accept himself in his age and his own ways. It was meant to sound stupid and creepy,” he told WPRO-AM.
He said the parade was an “improper reaction” and a form of “bullying.”
“It’s vicious and intimidating,” Sorrentino said of the parade. “The fact that this is seen as an appropriate reaction to something I wrote in the paper is really disgusting.”
He said the reactions to his letter have included profane voicemails and death threats.
Burke said in a Facebook post ahead of the event that no negativity or hateful speech directed toward Sorrentino or anyone else would be allowed during the parade.
“We will not engage with ANY residents on the street in any negative way,” Burke wrote in a separate Facebook post. “Please do not come for a fight, you will be shut down.”
Burke said she invited Sorrentino to don yoga pants and join the parade, but he “impolitely declined.”
Sorrentino said he really has no problem with yoga pants.
“I have no problem with yoga pants. Wear them all you want! I actually have a pair myself that I was going to wear for the parade tomorrow but I’m really not happy about the parade,” he said.
