Composing Sweaty Betty’s Ode to Legs of All Kinds

There’s something familiar about the celebratory, riotous tone of body positivity in Sweaty Betty’s new ode to legs. The newest instalment of the ‘Wear the Damn Shorts’ campaign for Sweaty Betty, created by Havas London, is invigorating, but seems worryingly retro. Creative director Amy Fasey knows why: “It’s 2025 and we’re still having to talk about this shit. It’s a bit wild that this is still a thing. And actually, the way society is making women feel again at the moment – with the backdrop of Ozempic, Mounjaro and the whole weight-loss conversation – there’s just a lot out there that’s making women feel crap about themselves again.”

‘Wear the Damn Shorts’ is a positioning that Sweaty Betty was already using, based on insights about how common it is for women to feel self conscious about their legs, but for spring/summer 2025, “they wanted to have something that’s a bit of a big bang,” says Amy.

Amy, Nathalie and the rest of the female-majority Havas team were of course conscious of what she calls the “general uncomfortableness that most women feel about getting their legs out.” And the usual sources of women’s lack of confidence were batted about at the briefing stage – Amy references the “sidebar of shame and how women have been ridiculed for years with captions like, ‘flabby leg here’ or “cellulite there’.”

But the extent to which women in the UK feel uncomfortable with their legs surprised even the team. “It’s not all the same thing. I might really hate my knobbly knees, for instance. Another woman might hate her cellulite, or feel that she’s even too muscly.” In the research stage, the severity of the problem was shocking. “Almost every woman had something about their legs they seemed to dislike or wanted to cover up,” Amy expands. “When summer came around, they were almost too embarrassed to get them out.”

Sweaty Betty’s research* found that 67% of women believe their body image negatively impacts their self-esteem, while just 18% of women believe their body image positively impacts their self-esteem.

Furthermore, the survey also found that nearly 1 in 2 women have skipped a workout because they didn’t feel confident in what they were wearing, and only 15% of Sweaty Betty customers wear shorts regularly. When asked why, consumers shared barriers such as skin appearance, age perception, self-confidence and body image.

But legs are such a significant part of a human body and they are worth celebrating. “They carry you through life,” says Amy. “That’s quite a powerful thing. A lot of women obviously hate a lot of parts of their bodies, but I don’t think it quite occurred to all of us how much a lot of women hate, specifically, their legs. There’s clearly a lot of self-consciousness.”

Havas London’s creative response to that: “We showed nothing but legs. Everything is cropped off,” says Amy. “Even down to going into the macro textures of legs. And we wanted to kind of call out very specifically what all these women were feeling.” The research had provided such an array of personal, specific, three-dimensional feelings about legs. And the campaign responds to a vast range of those.

Directed by Amy and Nathalie themselves (collectively known as RIOT), the 30-second hero film features macro close-ups of legs and thighs, focusing on features such as varicose veins, stretch marks, patchy fake tan, moles and cellulite. The film ends with the tagline ‘Wear the Damn Shorts’.

Sitting alongside the campaign film is a series of OOH assets which include further close-ups of legs, alongside several tag lines that drive home the message that we should all embrace our imperfections, including; ‘Getting your legs out has no age limit’ and ‘These legs are made for flaunting’. The campaign will also feature across Sweaty Betty shopfronts, social, online and radio.

To get that range just right, casting was key. “We saw so many legs, I went leg blind,” laughs Amy. The priority was to reflect the truth of women’s feelings in the final selection, Amy reflects that a lot of thinking went into figuring out what were the slightly more frequently mentioned issues that women have with their legs and making sure those were represented.

At the same time, maximising diversity, from raising awareness of rarer skin conditions through to the kind of stretch marks that everyone would know. “It was really a kind of open conversation and seeing what we could get from a casting perspective,” says Amy. “We didn’t want to go in with a specific ‘it has to be this, this or this’, because you never really know what you're going to get.”

They knew that even on the day, they might have cast someone because they had varicose veins on the back of their legs, but when they looked down they might have psoriasis and stretch marks as well. “So some legs we were shooting multiple ways and exploring all the beauty about them, really,” Amy recalls.

Aesthetically, this was about showcasing beauty. “From the get-go, Nat and I spoke a lot about trying to present the issues that women have with their legs as a thing of beauty, acknowledging that they are things that make us – they become part of us. So we almost started looking at legs like art.

They started seeing varicose veins as lightning strikes, calling stretch marks ‘go-faster stripes’, zooming in on these details and treating them like beautiful macro nature photography. “I think, particularly, the film is heavily weighted with all of that. We've also brought that into the print and out-of-home as well, and added that kind of texture into each of them.”

But the still assets are also artworks. “Our designers really – for want of a better term – crafted the shit out of it,” chuckles Amy. “We had three designers working on it, passing it between them and adding little details that refined it each time. It was lovely to work on that kind of craft together.”

The detail will be worth spending some time to appreciate, when you see it up on a massive billboard. Features like a stamp with the ‘Wear the Damn Shorts’ lock-up that’s been run through a lot of processes to pull out actual skin textures from the shoot day. “So a group shot might feature one of those women’s legs, and we’d pull that texture and add it into the type,” says Amy. “There’s a really handcrafted feel to a lot of the out of home.”

When it came to the copywriting, the team enjoyed the process. “We're lucky. Sweaty Betty have got quite a relatable tone anyway as a brand – it’s fun and it’s got an occasional cheek to it. I think we definitely pushed that on even more, which was great. Relatability was central. And the result was lines like “Who cares if your skin hasn’t seen the sun since Aiya Napa 1999.”

Both Amy and Nathalie had a history directing music videos, short documentaries and some ad stuff. And they saw this project as a chance to immerse themselves even deeper in their creation by seeing its execution through. “It went pretty well. We really enjoyed it and we want to do more of it,” says Amy, remembering the shoot fondly, despite the pressure to deliver a great campaign. “It really was a lovely environment. We pushed quite hard for a majority-women crew. It’s probably the only set I’ve been on where I’ve seen a female gaffer, female techs walking around – a set like I’ve never been on before. And then obviously we had an all-female cast.

“Particularly on the stills shoot, we had a really lovely time. We just put on some ’90s pop bangers and everyone was properly dancing. The sun was shining. It was just a really nice environment – like hanging out with your mates.”

That allowed for serendipity to improve the carefully-planned campaign. After casting one woman who had some incredible tattoos, when the creative leads saw her full legs on the day in full, she actually had a tattoo they hadn’t seen of a full-length woman with bare legs and little high heels on. “It was one of those moments: this is amazing, we have to put this in. It’s so meta – legs on legs. So that made it into the edit, of course.”

Above: Behind-the-scenes on the shoot.

Amy and Nathalie both actually have skin in the game – their legs ended up in the film. “Nat’s got an amazing scar, and I’ve got quite a few moles and things like that that we included. Nat was quite heavily pregnant at the time – getting a lot of swelling – and we were both wearing Sweaty Betty socks. Just at the end of the shoot, Nat rolled her socks down and rubbed her leg, and I noticed she had this big SB indent on her leg from the socks, with stripes. I thought, that’s great – get that on camera. It was just one of those incidental things that made it into the edit. A fun little addition that wasn’t planned.”

The vibes couldn’t have been more conducive to this kind of experimentation because everyone was on a mission together. The all-female team at the brand was a dream for Amy. “It’s been lovely working with them, to be honest. They’re a really smart, easy-going bunch,” she says. “It’s nice and refreshing to have a chance to work with a brand that wants to make women feel good about themselves – to actually embrace their natural selves in one way, shape or form.”

We have all seen brands fighting this fight alongside women. “Obviously, it’s been done really well by a lot of great brands in the past, but it’s nice to have a refreshed approach to that,” says Amy, going back to the worrying context of these times. “You’ve got new generations coming up who’ve never seen or heard of that kind of brand work before. So for them, keeping that confidence and that feeling of embracing your imperfections top of mind is still so important. Because they’re on their phones all the time, seeing loads of not-nice stuff online. So for there to be even one little thing out there, that’s nice.”

Amy’s being modest. This isn’t a little thing. It’s an ambitious work of creativity, meticulously crafted into something that has the potential to impact women emotionally, to help them feel confident enough to ‘Wear the Damn Shorts’.

*Survey was carried out by Sweaty Betty in April 2025, and surveyed both Sweaty Betty customers and women in the UK and US.