In March, Ty Haney was scrolling through Instagram when she was served an ad for Outdoor Voices, the beloved-by-millennials athleisure company she founded in 2013. She had unfollowed the brand in 2020 shortly after her protracted exit as CEO, which began when she was on maternity leave and concluded with a smattering of stories that accused her of being terrible at the job. In the years since, Haney had attempted to scrub all traces of OV from her life — an effort that included purging “a hoarder’s amount” of her own pastel workout gear. The ad alarmed her: It was for a polo dress she had debuted with Vogue in 2018, but now she beheld “a bastardized version with seams everywhere,” she says. “Yikes!” she typed into the comments. “Y’all have lost your way …” She hit POST and felt a thrill of something she now describes as “punk rock.”
“It just irritates me when I see it pop up on social,” Haney says. “It’s like — what the fuck is going on here?”

“It’s kind of sickening to see how low it’s gotten,” she says of the direction the brand has taken. “I feel sad for it.”

Read @sangeetaskurtz’s #Encounter with @ty_haney at the link in bio.

Photo by @_hugoyu