Elastic & the Environment

The industry is quite happy with the sizing problem because it generates spending. But in mitigation of the infelicity it causes, it has come up with a compromise — elastic. Stretch is what lets a single garment pretend to fit many bodies, and it is everywhere now, sold to us as comfort. But it comes at a cost — to our pockets, the garment and the environment.

Elastic — elastane, also sold as spandex or Lycra — is not a natural fibre but a synthetic one: a plastic, spun from petroleum. It does not biodegrade; left in the ground it persists more or less indefinitely, and in the wearing and washing it sheds microplastics. It is also, oddly, the part of a garment that perishes first: heat, perspiration, body oils, sunlight and repeated stretching break the polymer down, so it slackens and gives out long before the cloth around it would have. And because even a few per cent of it cannot be separated from the wool, cotton or silk it is blended into, a single thread of elastic is enough to make an otherwise natural garment neither recyclable nor compostable. None of this improves at the top of the market: an expensive stretch garment is as synthetic, and as short-lived, as a cheap one.

An elasticated garment — whatever it is sold as — is not a tailored one and was never built to last. We are sold a great deal of elastic precisely because it doesn't: a garment that gives out is a garment soon replaced, which serves those selling it considerably better than it serves us.