PicoBlog

Last year my friend gave me a strip-pieced polyester quilt top that they had been holding onto. The maker had paired the stretchier knits with a stiff cotton backing to stop them from warping and I was impressed by that attention to detail, which contradicted my internalized biases against polyester as, well, crap. I studied the quilt top, which I found quite beautiful, and remembered one that I had passed up years ago at the thrift. It was hand pieced from tiny squares of the stiffest doubleknit polyester and I had recoiled as soon as I touched it, unprepared for the oddly warm scratchiness of the dense fabric. With those two quilts in mind I started to read about polyester, hoping to learn enough to know them better.

What I already knew was that polyester is a petro-fabric, a textile made from petroleum. I knew that it sheds microplastic into our watershed and that those tiny particles live in us now, in our blood and in the plants and animals we share the planet with. In my research I learned that polyester came onto the scene during WWII when industrialized countries like the US wanted to break their reliance on cotton and silk producing countries who were seeking independence from their colonial powers. I learned that for a few years polyester was lauded as freedom in the shape of time for hausfraus who were liberated from the need to iron their household’s clothing and bedding. I learned, too, that polyester as it existed in those quilts: a crude, extruded fiber knit into thick, scratchy fabric in unfading colors, had a short lifespan. It blasted onto the scene unwrinkled, affordable, and highly advertised, and when the price of oil was raised in 1973 and polyester’s price could not be it was made synonymous with the lower classes and unceremoniously phased out of fashion, replaced without fanfare by the subtler (and softer) micro-plastic polyester blended with other fibers that is ubiquitous to our clothing and bedding right now.

Here we are, living in a world saturated in polyester, one of our lasting gifts to the earth. Truly it will outlive us all, the dinosaurs will in fact inherit the earth. Polyester is a substance created in greed, manipulated to always benefit those at the top and to give those toiling near the bottom the illusion of choice and freedom. I believe that it changed things, but I refuse to see freedom from ironing as synonymous with true liberation. We’ve been told that the radical choice is to eschew the ol’ plastic baddie in favor of “natural” fibers and their illusion of goodness. In truth polyester changed cotton and wool, too, its popularity (and government funding) forced small producers to band together into huge trade organizations to compete under capitalism. Technology developed to produce polyester led to heavier chemical processing of wool, cotton, and linen, which had a huge environmental impact that was neatly swept under the rug when the tide turned and polyester became the convenient scapegoat for the environmental movement.

As I read all of these strange and terrible things about polyester I expected to feel a deeper revulsion. But instead I found my perspective shifting. There is nothing radical about saying “not my problem” or turning away in disgust. Polyester is the legacy we did not choose and ignoring or sending it to timeout in a landfill won’t make it go away. Polyester has considerably more time than we do.

How do we live with polyester?

What if we took responsibility for this substance we’ve inherited?

Can it be reframed for positive change?

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