Are the Twists and Turns Needed to Ditch Synthetics Self-inflicted?

Changing Markets Foundation recently described the fashion industry as being in a state of “plastic paralysis.” Textile Exchange’s annual Materials Market Report confirmed the nonprofit’s findings, reporting that polyester production reached an all-time high in 2023, accounting for 57 percent of all the fiber made worldwide last year.

But some brands are fighting back.

At the SJ x Rivet Sustainability conference in Los Angeles in September, Sourcing Journal’s sourcing and labor editor Jasmin Malik Chua brought together two eschewers for a conversation on the industry’s move away from synthetics.

For Triarchy, the denim-centric family business’s entire ethos is centered around ridding the world of synethetics. While Triarchy was working to reduce its water use and cut down on chemicals, the Bergdorf Goodman-backed brand zoomed out a bit and began thinking about what it is to be sustainable more holistically.

“[It] started feeling like going to look at a house and the realtor is telling you about how incredible the toxic-free paint is, but the walls are full of asbestos,” Adam Taubenfligel, Triarchy’s cofounder, creative director and responsibility lead, said. “Who cares about the paint and the wash process and the chemicals if what we’re putting it on is a petroleum-based garment?”

Meanwhile, Shobha Philips set out to address broader issues within the supply chain — including but not limited to exploitation and anti-environmentalism — with her brand.

“What was available to me [as] a new designer in the industry, I started actually using recycled polyester, which was really popular in 2015 and it had the advantage of customers understanding the story of taking water bottles and turning it into fabric,” Philips, founder of Proclaim, said. “Since then, a focus that has come to a lot of people is the health effects of synthetic fibers, especially for women’s health. Being a women’s underwear company, these are products we wear close to our skin; we wanted to start trying to address that.”

Both Proclaim and Triarchy, Chua pointed out, produce products reliant on petrochemicals as stretch is paramount to both denim and shapewear. While some solutions exist, the two brands have largely been charting unfamiliar waters.  

“There’s no legality that says you have to disclose what you’re doing to those plastic water bottles in order to turn them from what they were originally intended [as] into this new stretch fiber; that didn’t sit right with me,” Taubenfligel said. “To me, all the solutions that existed were still plastic based; even if it’s recycled, you need virgin plastic to become recycled plastic. It was all just plastic, plastic, plastic.”

That’s one of the reasons why Triarchy turned to Candiani Denim’s biodegradable Coreva technology. Instead of using spandex or petroleum-based plastic, Coreva uses natural rubber derived from trees to provide the familiar elastic feel as well as offer a biodegradable alternative.

“We needed to find a completely new way forward that didn’t feel like we were making future garbage because, I think, everything in this room is going to return back to the earth,” Taubenfligel said. “And my thought was, let’s just have it be as least harmful as it possibly can be when that day comes. And we turned to rubber.”

Taking “cues from adjacent industries,” Proclaim utilizes two main materials in lieu of elastane: the castor plant-based EVO material and Hyosung’s biobased spandex, Creora, when it launched in the shapewear space in May. That shapewear line is currently 87 percent bio-based, but hitting 100 percent would require a few things — namely investment and R&D.

And though sustainability is occasionally a synonym for sacrifice, as pointed out by Chua, Philips doesn’t think of Proclaim as making compromises but rather making intentional choices.

“It does set a certain parameter of barrier but that forces you to be more creative,” she said. “The combination of the material and the process that we were using to create our shapewear line created enough room for us to do bring about what we needed to do.”

The rubber does meet the road, though, when talking about cost.

“Sustainability is an affluent conversation — it’s not cheap. Rubber is not cheap,” Taubenfligel said. “At the end of the day, you just have to take that stance, you have to say ‘this is the lane that we’re going to operate in.’ The solutions then seem to present themselves and you work on them with your partners and get it to a place where you can bring it to market. And then eventually —hopefully — with  further adoption, the costs will be brought down. But that takes time.”

And time is temperamental, Philips learned.

“There’s no timetable; this development process took almost two years. If you’re operating under a traditional fashion calendar and you have to hit certain deadlines, that would be challenging,” she said. “Taking our time with that process we tried a ton of different materials before we landed on the ones that we ended up working with…being open to trying new things that might not be the solution that you thought it was going to be — and also it’s not going to be perfect.”

The important takeaway, Taubenfligel said, is that an effort is attempted. That difficult conversations are being had. That those conversations are transparent and work to educate customers through action. The irony of a brand reducing the chemicals used on its polyester clothing is not lost on Triarchy; rather, it is this “huge disconnect” that set the California company on its path.

“What I can’t sit with is how many times I’ve seen a piece of marketing that’s all about saving water and it’s literally on a can of oil. How can we put marketing out there, in good conscience, that talks about one part of the process and leaves out the — arguably — much bigger part? The consumer only hears what we tell them,” Taubenfligel said. “We are the source of the information. The onus is on us to check our integrity and to check if [something] is greenwashing. There really needs to be a check with the way language is used. That, to me, is the biggest problem in this industry.”