Polyester

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Robert E. Schnakenberg

The Frankenstein's monster of fabrics, polyester has enjoyed more lives than the evil baron's monstrous creation. The wonder fiber of the post-war West became the fashion rage of the superfueled 1970s. Then, dismissed and disavowed by the cognoscenti, it seemed on the verge of extinction until modern science resurrected its utility in the form of polar fleece in the 1990s. What a long, strange trip it's been.

Other than LSD, perhaps no man-made compound influenced the style of an era quite like polyester. And like LSD, it had its origins in a European laboratory. Polyester, the invention of two chemists working at the Calico Printers Association in England, was not the first man-made fiber. Rayon and Nylon had been in use for years as sportswear and stockings, respectively. But when J.T. Dickson and J.R. Whinfield hit upon a way to spin petrochemical molecules into threads, they created a fiber that was light years ahead in terms of its versatility and utility. The DuPont company sensed the commercial potential of the new invention and purchased the patents for it in 1950. Within three years, polyester was being produced in mass quantities.

Polyester's principal virtue was its plasticity. Natural fibers like cotton or wool cannot be re-engineered, but a man-made fabric like polyester can be custom designed to produce a different aesthetic. With advances in technology, new polyester blends were concocted that simulated the look and feel of "real" fabrics. Furthermore, because polyester is naturally permanently pressed, the need for irons and ironing boards was greatly reduced. DuPont even coined a term, "wash and wear," to describe the wondrous properties of its new synthetic.

Throughout the 1960s, polyester was sold to the public as the avatar of a new era of space age convenience in clothing. And for the most part, the people seemed to be buying it. Ads for "perma-prest," "wash-and-wear," and "double knit" items began dotting the pages of such barometers of public taste as the New York Times and the Sears catalog. In the 1970s, polyester pantsuits, leisure suits, and garishly-colored knit shirts stormed into fashion, as the fabric attained a kind of hipster cachet among suburban moderns. Poly blend sport shirts and flared slacks seemed the perfect attire for weekend barbecues, wife-swapping parties, and trips to the singles bar. Demand for the wonder synthetic became so great by 1974 that manufacturers had difficulty filling their orders.

What killed polyester? Like the fierce debate over "Who lost China?" in the 1950s, the question admits no easy answer. For one thing, there was the problem of ubiquity. By the late 1970s, polyester fashion had become so absorbed into the mainstream that it lost all claim on fashionable taste. Furthermore, with so much polyester on the market--and so much of it cheaply constructed--the fabric's inherent weaknesses began to assert themselves. Simply put, polyester does not breathe the way cotton does. The resultant tendency toward sweatiness gave the clothes a disagreeable downmarket connotation. Finally, the excesses of disco, as personified by John Travolta's egregious white polyester suit in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, put the final nail in the wonder fabric's coffin.

For almost two decades, polyester languished in popular disrepute. Occasionally used in blends in order to make clothes less expensive, it was all but shunned as an emblem of poor taste by anyone with a shred of fashion sense. Camp film director John Waters even titled his 1981 celebration of tackiness Polyester. In the mid-1990s, however, the miracle fiber began to make a comeback in the form of polar fleece. Best known under the trade name Polartec, the fabric was marketed in the form of sweaters, leggings, hats, and mittens by such hip winter wear outfitters as Patagonia and Lands' End. Once again, polyester's utility was the major selling point. Polar fleece is lightweight and does not absorb as much water as other fabrics, making it the perfect lining for outerwear.

And as it had in the 1950s, utility begat fashionability. By 1998, top designers such as Donna Karan and Tommy Hilfiger were integrating polar fleece into their clothing lines. While it was perhaps too early to declare polyester completely rehabilitated, the popularity of winter sports and the rise of casual chic seemed to assure the continued marketability of polar fleece into the new millenium. The wonder fabric's most remarkable attribute, it seemed, was its indestructibility.