A Generation Raised in Polyester

Polyester Active Wear Has Become The Standard For Working Out

There is a particular way I move through a clothing rack, and I have done it my whole working life without ever quite thinking about it as unusual. My fingers go first, before my eyes settle on colour or cut. I am feeling for the fiber underneath the print, searching for something that moves like it was grown rather than manufactured, something that will sit against skin without catching or clinging in that synthetic way. My grandmother taught me this with her own hands, standing beside me at in a department store decades ago, showing me what quality actually feels like rather than what a price tag claims it to be. It is a form of intuitive and sensed listening, a skill that has almost disappeared.

I think about her often now, because I am watching an entire generation come of age having never learned this at all, through no fault of their own. They were born into wardrobes already filled with cotton blends and pure polyester, raised inside a leisurewear and gym culture where synthetic fabric became the default rather than the exception. Polyester now makes up close to sixty percent of all fibre produced on this planet, and synthetic fibres as a whole account for the overwhelming majority of what clothing is made from today, a figure that has more than doubled since the turn of this century. This generation grew up idolising the very brands built on that fabric, taught to see the swoosh or the logo on a pair of leggings as something worth saving for, worth investing their first dollars earnt into, without ever being knowing what their clothing was constructed from.

What gives me hope is watching my own son stand in a store now, turning a t-shirt inside out before he decides whether it earns a place in his wardrobe. He scans the label the way I once watched my grandmother read fabric with her fingertips, looking for the word polyester itself, and for the aliases it hides behind: microfibre, performance fabric, moisture wicking, even "recycled polyester," which sounds virtuous and still began its life as plastic. He is spending his own hard earned money, and he wants it to go toward something that is actually good for him. Watching him do this, at his age, tells me something is shifting.

That shift is coming from his generation and the one just ahead of it, the millennials now old enough to hold real purchasing power and loud enough to be heard. They are the ones asking brands to prove sustainability rather than simply claim it, tracking movements built around fair labor and honest sourcing, and walking away from brands the moment a claim turns out to be empty. Recent research puts the number who have abandoned a purchase after learning of a brand's poor environmental record at close to three in four, a widespread sentiment now rather than a fringe one, and a real market correction taking shape in front of us.

Here is what still concerns me: the fashion industry has operated for the better part of twenty years with almost none of the accountability we now expect from the food industry. We read ingredient labels on what we eat and ask hard questions about what goes into our bodies, yet for two decades we allowed an entire industry to produce fabric that touches our skin for hours every single day, sweat trapped against plastic, heat activating chemical finishes, with almost no one asking what that was doing to us or to the earth receiving it all back afterward. Fashion has been operating, mostly unaccountable for their actions.

So I find myself wondering something more pointed: how long before polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex, and the newer manufactured fibres wearing softer, more sustainable sounding names, like Tencel and modal, stop being the default answer to what a wardrobe is built from, and we return in earnest to fiber that is simply grown and harvested rather than engineered in a plant.

My honest guess is that this shift arrives gradually rather than on a single clean date, industry by industry and brand by brand, pulled forward by exactly the kind of label reading my son already practices and the accountability his generation keeps demanding out loud. If I had to place a number on it, I would say the next decade decides it, since the fiber and the technology already exist; what has been missing is demand loud enough to be impossible to ignore.

May Fashion Be Well Too!

Much Love

Claie

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