Polyester became the clothing industry’s favorite way to fatten margins. Shoppers now pay premium sums for the same cheap fiber filling discount racks
In September, designer Gabriela Hearst, a former creative director at French fashion house Chloé, had a bit of insider info for the audience at Columbia University: the luxury brands that sell $5,000 dresses rely heavily on polyester, which she said costs “maybe a couple of euros” a yard. “Margins, margins,” she said when asked why they choose such cheap material. “A lot of money gets spent on marketing. My industry is in for a real reckoning partly because of that.”
To Hearst, polyester is “dead material from another geological time,” and the little she uses in her own products is all recycled. But the same fabric fills clothing racks at every price. Polyester made up 59% of all the fiber produced in the world in 2024, about three times cotton’s share, according to Textile Exchange, an industry group that tracks fiber production. The world makes more than twice as much fiber as it did in 2000, and synthetics made from fossil fuels added more to that growth than any other kind of fiber, according to Textile Exchange’s report.
Polyester took over because it kept getting cheaper. Through the first nine months of 2025, polyester fiber sold for a little over half the price of cotton, according to the International Cotton Advisory Committee, a group of 21 national governments with a stake in the cotton trade. Fabric, which makes up roughly 60% of what it costs to make a garment, is the obvious place for a brand to save money, and middle-market brands such as Gap $GPS NaN% have swapped in polyester to hold their prices. Many now charge $100 or more for clothes that feel just like Shein’s.
Over decades, chemical companies, mills, and brands made polyester the fabric of choice for margin-conscious clothing makers. A brand that wants to sell better clothes now can’t easily give it up, and shoppers end up paying higher prices for the same cheap fabric.
The low price that kept clothing makers choosing polyester
When polyester first reached American stores in May 1951, chemical conglomerate DuPont sold it as a fabric that saved shoppers work. A traveler could wash polyester clothes, let them dry on a hanger, and put them back on a few hours later — all without any ironing. DuPont coined the phrase “wash and wear” for the fiber, according to a history of polyester on Encyclopedia.com. The clothing maker Hart, Schaffner & Marx began selling men’s suits in a fabric that was 55% Dacron, DuPont’s new synthetic fiber, and 45% worsted wool, and it sold well enough that DuPont built a new plant in Kinston, N.C., in 1953. Polyester quickly became the fastest-growing fiber in the U.S.
Polyester sold so well in 1974 that manufacturers had trouble filling orders. Within a few years it had flooded the market and gone out of style, and by the late 1970s shoppers had turned on it. College students called it the “P” curse and saw it as cheap. In the 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever,” John Travolta wore a white polyester suit, and through the 1980s, people joked about polyester as a sign of body odor and bad taste. Clothing makers kept using it anyway. For almost two decades after the late 1970s, they still blended it into clothes to make them cheaper. The Tennessee Eastman Company and the fiber makers’ trade group ran campaigns pitching polyester as easy to care for instead of cheap.
Each time cotton got expensive, mills put more polyester into their yarn, and many never switched back. “When cotton prices rise significantly above polyester and rayon, spinners and brands often increase the use of synthetics in blends, a trend that has been observed repeatedly over the past decade,” Lorena Ruiz, an economist at the cotton committee, wrote in its 2025 review of the market. The clearest case came after cotton hit record prices in early 2011, when for a time cotton cost more than $1.20 a pound above polyester. Many mills, especially in China, moved to polyester and rayon. The committee says mills kept using more synthetic fiber for years after that, while cotton’s share of the world’s fiber slowly shrank.
Over the past several years, Chinese companies have made polyester cheaper still by owning every step from the oil refinery to the finished fiber. Two of China’s biggest producers, Hengli and Rongsheng, each refine about 20 million metric tons of oil a year and also make the chemicals that go into polyester, and the polyester itself, according to a 2024 presentation by Argus Media, a British firm that publishes commodity prices. China’s leading polyester makers “have changed their role to be complex petrochemical manufacturers after adding mega-refinery projects,” Argus says. By the firm’s measure, making polyester yarn cost about a third less in 2020 than in 2000. Much of that cheap fiber now leaves China for garment factories elsewhere. China exported more than 4.5 million metric tons of polyester fiber in 2023. More of the world’s garment sewing has shifted out of China to countries across Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. China’s shipments of polyester fiber to India alone grew nearly fivefold from 2019.
The polyester habit that quality brands can’t easily break
A brand that wants to sell on quality can’t simply switch back to cotton. Farmers already grow less of it than the world’s mills want. The U.S. Department of Agriculture expects mills to use nearly 5% more cotton than farmers grow this season, the biggest shortfall since 2020-21. Polyester output, meanwhile, grew by almost 5 million metric tons in 2025 alone, equal to a fifth of the world’s entire cotton harvest, according to Textile Exchange’s latest count.
So most big brands have turned to recycled polyester instead. By the industry’s own count, 98% of recycled polyester starts as a plastic bottle rather than as old clothing. Adidas, H&M and Patagonia each say more than 90% of the polyester they use is recycled, but Patagonia still makes about 80% of its materials from synthetic fibers. In a 2024 survey of big clothing companies by Changing Markets, a nonprofit that tracks the fashion industry’s plastic use, most had promised only to cut their use of new synthetics, not synthetics altogether.
Several brands that promised to use less synthetic fabric ended up using more. C&A, Esprit, Inditex and Reformation each promised in 2022 to cut back, and by 2024 each was using a bigger share or a bigger volume of synthetics, the same survey found. Inditex, which owns Zara, used about a fifth more synthetics in 2023 than in 2022. Hugo Boss says it will stop using polyester and polyamide, a nylon-type fiber, by 2030, but its use of synthetics more than doubled from 2020 to 2023.
Shoppers have noticed the difference in material and started reading the label. Many don’t like what they find.
Nafeesah Attah, a lawyer who calls herself an “OG fast fashion shopper,” told NPR that her clothes began to shrink and fade after only a few trips through the wash. When she started reading labels, she found polyester throughout her closet. “Once you know better, it’s like your eyes are opened up to the fact that there’s just so many poorly made clothes out there,” she said. She still buys polyester, but only when she loves the piece and it’s no more than about half polyester.
Other shoppers on social media have complained about the price of clothes made with polyester. Michael Palladino, who teaches the business of fashion at Kingsborough Community College in New York, told NPR that his students pick natural fibers more often. A label shows how much polyester is in a garment, but judging the quality of the polyester itself is harder.
Changing Markets expects synthetic fabric to make up a growing share of the world’s textiles over the next few years, climbing to 73% of the world’s textile production by 2030. With synthetics set to spread, Hearst’s request to her industry is modest. “At the bare minimum, if you change nothing else, at least know the number,” she told the audience at Columbia. “Know how much synthetic fiber is in the materials you sell.”
Source: https://qz.com/