There are few things in this world I hate more than plastic. It's contaminated everything, and trying to find clothes made without it has to be a concerted effort.
There are few things in this world I hate more than plastic. It's contaminated everything, and trying to find clothes made without it has to be a concerted effort.
Polyester triumphed by becoming a performance textile. ‘It moved from being disco to sporty’, says Amanda Briggs, a designer and trend consultant who spent three decades at Nike. By answering the demands of outdoor enthusiasts and athletes, polyester developed attributes that pleased just about everyone.
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Naming the fleece Synchilla, Patagonia enjoyed an exclusive license for the first two years. After that, Malden Mills sold the material to others in the outdoor apparel industry, branding it PolarFleece, a term that eventually became generic. It was amazing stuff – incredibly light and warm, with a great feel and a reasonable price. Fleece was soon everywhere. It made Patagonia’s name and popularized performance apparel beyond hardcore enthusiasts, largely replacing wool for winter wear. ‘Polyester really did emerge with polar fleece’, says Parkes. Around the same time, cheaper, more compact insulation made from crimped polyester was supplanting the duck and goose down that absorbed water and made coat wearers look like the Michelin Man.
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‘Those two innovations – base layer and fleece – completely changed the world’s opinion of polyester, not just the outdoor industry’, says Harward. ‘It became seen as the high-end performance comfort fiber. Over time, polyester’s success as a performance fiber allowed it to reclaim its fashion luster.
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Ultrasuede became a mainstay of upholstery and auto interiors. Toray popularized the term ‘microfibre’ among consumers when it introduced a cleaning cloth in 1987. Most people who bought it had no idea that the high-tech fibers were good old polyester.
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In response [to environmental concerns], polyester innovators are working to solve the old performance problems with a new constraint: keeping environmental impacts to a minimum. About 15 percent of polyester fiber now comes from recycled rather than virgin material, and the proportion is rising. Reusing polyester reduces greenhouse emissions and makes the textile less dependent on new petroleum production.
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But today most recycled polyester currently comes from bottles, not textiles, because PET containers are far easier to collect and the material doesn’t have other substances mixed in. A 100 percent polyester shirt can be chopped up, melted, and turned into new fibers. For a cotton-poly blend, recycling is cumbersome and likely not economical.
There are few things in this world I hate more than plastic. It's contaminated everything, and trying to find clothes made without it has to be a concerted effort.
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