• New York, Tuesday, July 28, 2009 10:33 AM

Bryant Urstadt takes a hands-on -- hands down, really -- approach in his look at the yoga brand Lululemon, which a subhed claims has turned fitness into a spectator sport. He opens his piece in downward dog position, surrounded by about 400 women colorfully and provocatively garbed in Lululemon attire atop Lululemon mats at Manhattan's Bryant Park, where biweekly open-air yoga practices are held.

"The signature Lulu piece is the $98 Groove Pant, cut with all kinds of special gussets and flat seams to create a gluteal enclosure of almost perfect globularity, like a drop of water free from gravity ... ," Urstadt writes, before taking a cold shower and discoursing on the brand's popularity among starlets, Upper East Siders and Westchesterites. He also traces its growth from a single store-with-a-mission launched by one Chip Wilson in Vancouver in 2000 to today's ambitions to build no more than 400 outlets, more like J. Crew than Starbucks.

Get the picture? If you do, you know that the brand is bound to "annoy as many people as it has outfitted," not only because some feel that it has all the trapping of a cult but also because it commercializes yogic practice, which is meant to be practiced free of material trappings. But Lululemon has a 21st century take on the venerable mind-body discipline: "Good karma and great cash flow."

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