Polyester: How a chemical company convinced the world to wear plastic

Brought to you by [Quartz Obsession] Polyester September 19, 2017 Stretching the limit --------------------------------------------------------------- Yesterday Nike [introduced a new super-material]( called “Flyleather,” which recycles leather scraps and makes them lighter and stronger, while maintaining the look and feel of premium leather. The secret ingredient? Polyester. For better and for worse, perhaps no material has done more to reshape everyday fashion in the past century. Today it’s the most-produced fabric in the world, but polyester‘s rise to stretchy, wrinkle-free domination wasn’t always so assured. by the digits [68:]( you can go without washing clothing made from polyester, according to a 1951 marketing campaign. brief history Fashioning demand --------------------------------------------------------------- The DuPont company had a runaway hit on its hands when it created nylon—the first synthetic fabric—between the wars. Thanks to its usefulness in hosiery, nylon became the industrial giant’s most profitable product, generating earnings of more than $4.27 billion between 1940 and 1967. But when DuPont set out to create other synthetics in the 1950s, success didn’t come so easily. “Confronted by agile competitors and the volatile fashion trade, DuPont could no longer invest in materials and wait for sales to materialize,” the historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk [writes in a fascinating paper]( for The Business History Review. “It needed to imagine the wants, needs, and desires of consumers.” Initially people turned up their noses at the idea of wash-and-wear suits. So DuPont had to make the new fabric fashionable. Besides advertising straight to them, it did this by connecting with style editors and fashion designers directly, luring them to its convenient New York show rooms and sending material to Paris. DuPont made sure to send photographers along with it, so that Americans could see that the new material had a place on couture runways. Brought to you by Samsung Doodle interlude: ❤️ edition --------------------------------------------------------------- Love is in the air… or at least on your phone. Twitter data [reveals]( that five of the top ten most popular emojis express love or attraction: 😍 😊 ❤️ 💕 😘 (7 if you count 🔥 and ✨). Even if they’ve only got 140 characters, people are using their phones as a tool for self expression.[Find out what else the Galaxy Note8 can do]( pop quiz Which was never a trade name of polyester? CaravelleCrepesoftGolden TouchTrevira Correct. This is the name of a tulip. Incorrect. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. explainer What is polyester, exactly? --------------------------------------------------------------- It’s a polymer, or a long chain of repeating molecular units, as Quartz’s fashion reporter Marc Bain explains: “The [most common variety]( is polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a [plastic derived from crude oil]( that’s used to make [soda and ketchup bottles](. When melted, it has the [consistency of cold honey]( and if you squeeze it through a spinneret, kind of like the shower head in your bathroom, you get long, continuous filaments. Draw those filaments out into [thin fibers]( weave lots of those fibers together, and you have a fabric.” watch this! Here’s a video that details how polyester can be made from recycled plastic bottles. a brief aside Why is this rat wearing underwear? --------------------------------------------------------------- In a 1993 study, an Egyptian urologist [studied the effect of]( different fabrics on the sex life of rats. He found that the rats who wore 100% polyester undies (as opposed to cotton, or a blend) had significantly less sex, which he attributed to the “electrostatic field” effect of the fabric. back to the thread The art of the blend --------------------------------------------------------------- There was no escaping the fact that early polyester was hot, itchy, and awkwardly heavy for dancing—it also tended to generate its own [peculiar funk](. In the ’70s, DuPont began focusing on the plethora of combinations that could be created from the many fibers in its arsenal. It was the dawn of the blend. [atlas_NJT-Q4tre@2x] Advances over the next several decades have made polyester more wearable, and today it’s a nearly invisible ingredient in many garments of our clothes. Here’s the high-tech process behind Nike’s Flyleather: - Take scraps of tanned hide left over from shoe production. - Grind those scraps into smaller leather fibers. - Sandwich them around a polyester screen, called a scrim. - Fuse the scrim and the fibers together using high-powered water jets. Talk to us What's your take on polyester? [Click here to vote]( If it didn't grow in a field, I'm not wearing it.Hmm... how long can I go without washing this leotard?All about dressing for comfort. In yesterday’s poll about [bitcoin mines]( 40% of you said you’d be “keeping it old school” when it comes to currency. That seems fitting for today’s topic. Today’s email was written by [Jessanne Collins]( and features reporting (and guidance) from [Marc Bain](. The correct answer to the quiz is Caravelle. 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