ABSTRACT
Many People Believe that clothes made from natural fibres — wool, cotton, linen, silk — are superior to clothes made from synthetics. Scores of college-educated American women and men with whom I have spoken on the subject of polyester — the most versatile and emblematic of the synthetics — are convinced that it does not ‘breathe’; that it ‘feels’ inferior; that it comes in garish or less than subtle colours. Polyester, I have been told, feels like Saran Wrap on a hot day; provokes uncontrollable itching and sweating; is a ‘yucky’ plastic (see Melinkoff 1984: 178). My casual probing has also elicited numerous references to class stigma: the word polyester conjures up the image of a lower middle-class tour group filing off a bus at Disneyland in pastel leisure suits. To one of my informants, a self-described cotton person, ‘polyester is K-Mart’. On a more analytical note, I have been told that, like other plastics, polyester violates certain rules of integrity, such as the rule that when cloth is set on fire, it should reduce to ashes, not melt and then solidify into a sticky mass.
