the state of textiles in america: or, ''it's all plastic?!''

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it's no secret if you follow me on fedi that i really, really love textiles. i sew, tailor my own clothes, and knit wearables and useful items for myself as regularly as wrist pain permits me to, and i've considered taking spinning classes just to really get to the bottom of how we turn shorn animal fibres into lovely garments that keep my constantly cold ass from shivering.

like, i love textiles and making textiles. a lot. as my fiance lovingly says, it's one of the things that when i talk about it shows my 'tism the most. and making textiles is HARD! ask any knitter how much time, skill, practice, materials, and labor goes into making a garment of theirs they particularly enjoy wearing, and i guarantee you'll get a small essay filled with a labor of love and passion for the craft. i knit myself a pair of gloves last year and i lovingly described them as 'my favorite pain in the ass i've ever made'; i had to learn how to knit in the round (knitting circularly, creating a full tube instead of a flat piece of fabric and then seamed into a 3d object.), decrease (knit stitches OUT of the garment.), increase (adding stitches mid-knit.), and slip stitches onto scrap yarn so i could pick them back up later to finish the thumb. it took me 8 months with my ADHD, wrist pain, and perfectionism to finish my gloves.

i love them so much. it took a tremendous amount of work, and i would do it all over again. and yet: the first question many people ask when i tell them the story is, ''gee, miles, that's a lot of work! why didn't you just go buy a pair for like, $8?''

well, for one: i'm a knitter! i like making objects myself; it's fun for me. but the other consequence of this is that i actually... can't just go and buy a pair of gloves like these - and if i did, it certainly would be more than $8.

let me now illustrate to you an ancedote of my past week; i've been watching the 1984 granada TV show adaptation of our favorite great detective, sherlock holmes, with my fiance. one thing about this show is there is no shortage of pure love for the costume design - i have been spending hours not just enthralled in the mystery of the hour, but gazing lovingly and longingly at every textile displayed upon the show. finely tailored suits, cozy hats, surprisingly realistic dresses for the era rather than the hoop-skirt corset-exaggerated-crenole that is perhaps immediately associated with all women of the victorian era, etc.

and of course, knitted garments - specifically scarves and blankets, my god, the blankets.

and so... naturally, this did lead me into thinking, ''you know what i don't have? a nice, cozy wool blanket to snuggle into.'' and yes, i could make one - but knitting takes an exceptionally long time for me, and i have two WIPs that have been kicking on my needles for a year now. so, i thought, why not buy one? wool blankets (irregardless of the type of wool used) have been around for centuries, due to wool's wonderful properties of keeping you warm. that can't be that hard to find commercially, surely.

let me tell you.

for starters, to find any textiles of actual quality, you need to remove our dearest foe amazon from the equation. amazon just flagrantly has wrong listings often, and anything you find on there if you do manage to hunt down the exact fibre composition of the garment is almost guaranteed to be 10-30% of whatever wool it's advertising. the remaining 90%-70%? it's plastic, my dear reader, it's plastic. acryllic. polyester. acryllic, specifically, does not actually keep you warm very well, and if it does, it's in the opposite direction trapping sweat and heat to the point it's uncomfortable to wear at best and in a dangerously cold situation, practically gasoline for hypothermia at worst.

so you take amazon out of the picture; now we go through box stores. i'm thumbing through many recognizeable brands, feeling a foreboding sense settle upon my limbs as the hours tick by. kohls, old navy, nordstrom. all i can find are 50%/50% blends, maybe 40%/60%. a few 30%/70%.

burberry makes a pure cashmere scarf and that's the best i can find. i look at sweaters. there is plastic. there is always plastic. machine washable is proudly displayed on every piece, the hallmark sign of plastic's inclusion in the fibres, because i've never seen a pure wool that wasn't handwash only.

it extends to me going to a thrift store the next day. i check tags of every sweater i look at; machine washable, superwash, it's all at least 50% acryllic or polyester. i check tags at costco. i can't escape the fucking acryllic. and i'm not even an entirely anti-acryllic knitter, but i'm sitting here frantically digging through websites in a growing sense of horror that finding one of the more basic textiles of our time is bordering impossible sans $800 scarves? how can this be?

eventually, i do locate them. smaller artisan craftsmen have always existed and will exist until the end of time, and for more reasonable prices (for the labor and materials), i track down some items. shetland sweaters for a much more understandable $120, blankets in the $100 range. to end my personal tale, i ended up finding and purchasing a handwoven yak wool blanket for about $45 due to a small sale the artist was having. woven fabrics are a bit cheaper than knit fabrics, and this does not disparage the labor in making either - it's just a matter of practicality.

so, here's what i've gathered over the past four days: genuine wool textiles are religated now to artisan craftsmen, be it smaller ones (aran sweater market in ireland, jamiesons knitwear in shetland), or more expensive tailoring providers still upholding a surprising commitment to their craft (such as o'connells clothing).

if you look at literally any sweater you own, i would be willing to bet if you bought it that it has no less than a minimum of 40% acryllic or polyester fibres in it - let alone your blankets, upon which i would guess that you probably just stuck with polyester as i have. (thanks, kohls, your 'the big one' sales are tragically addictive to everyone.)

and sure, okay, you might be saying: who cares? this stuff is a pain to hand-wash anyways, it should be small-quanity crafted. i cannot fault anyone for that opinion, but i have to say that this is just sort of a glaring symptom of an overarching problem now with textiles: nothing is built to last, it's all built to be quickest and easiest to produce. the rejection of mild inconveniences such as handwashing reinforces that no, we do not prioritize quality over convenience. machine washing is very rough with seams and fabrics; coupled with that, shirts and pants fall apart at the seams under light strain no matter how expensive they are now. and this lack of quality and care extends to, well... keeping you warm!

materials are constantly cutting costs, sourcing the cheapest fibres possible to improve profit lines (and of course, that pesky unpaid labor that companies try and shove under the rug.) and machine optimization is prioritizing speed rather than seam strength or weave/loop strength. everything is plastic fibres because it's easiest to wash, except cotton (which has always been a real MVP of the thread world, at least) and the surge in popularity of bamboo reyon.

animal fibres are pretty much used in the most meagre rations they can manage, because... well. it's expensive! it's money to pay people to care for their flock and money to spin the shorn wool into threads and yarns.

so why would you do that when you can just source cheaper fibres to make your garments? who really is going to notice, between rising temperatures and cost of living problems, that 'fall/winter clothing' doesn't actually keep you very warm anymore. maybe that'll encourage people to buy matching jackets, or even more poorly constructed cardigans that provide little to no warmth but a stylistic pop to the layered trends.

there's also the obvious: companies can just, like, lie. they can say that something is pure cashmere, pure merino, pure shetland wool, pure alpaca wool - but unless you literally can trace down everything, or they voluntarily list the exact composition, when it comes to bigger companies there's literally no way to prove if they aren't blended with some amount of plastic. acryllic is literally pennies cheap.

it would, and i say this with a heavy sigh, be almost foolish to not cut costs there as a big producer. it doesn't mean that we don't suffer as the consumers, though; it takes me ages to dig through the exact washing care on a garment to figure out what it's truly made of. (as a tip: if it's machine washable, it can't be 100% wool. even superwash wool is often treated with polyester resin coating to allow it to be washed.)

let's thumb through another example, the designer ralph polo lauren, who you may know the name of from an exceedingly funny yet sadly true post on the website we still know as twitter - in responding to actor ben schwartz's replica cosplay outfit prominantly featuring a ralph polo lauren's sweater, comedian and twitter user ellory smith joked, ''The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last twenty years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.'' familiar? no? okay, either way, let's look at their tags!

the wool-cashmere sweater: machine knit. ''90% wool, 10% cashmere.'' -- well, it is wool and cashmere, if not a meagerly amount of cashmere. the actual quality of the sweater's knit concerns me even more than the blend of fibres - it's awfully thin and the stitches are a bit... stretched in most of the photos. this is also a $200 sweater. at least the advertised 'pure cashmere sweater' is claiming to be 100% cashmere... for $500, and the same construction.

these high-end sweaters are strangely constructed, with no tapering or proper ribbing; off-the-rack fit, indeed, but even generally-sized sweaters from craftsmen typically use proper ribbing around the sleeve cuffs and sweater end to pull in some form and tapering as well as improve their insulating properties. and again: knits are not supposed to be thin enough to see your skin through while wearing them unless they're done in fingering weight.

i have a cashmere* sweater and it's nowhere near this fucking thin. and of course, when the individual knit loops are that easy to expose, they're easy to catch on things and start unravelling holes in the damn thing. and then your $200 sweater has to be repaired... or more likely, you just go buy a new one.

what the hell is going on? i have a knit beanie that i love to death i bought from a local knitter who hangs out with some of the wool farmers in my area (rural life, baby.) that keeps me thirty times as warm as any acryllic or polyester beanie i've borrowed from family. my two knit scarves (one a gift from my sibling-in-law, one i made myself) keep me cozy warm whereas the admittedly adorable and emotionally meaningful minecraft scarf i've had since i was 16 that is all polyester might as well be like a cotton button up in the rain around here. literally all knit gloves i've tried might as well be as useless as disposable plastic ones in any moderate cold of the PNW.

here's a challenge for you: next time you go shopping, try and find a well-made sweater or shawl that isn't at least 30% acryllic or polyester. alternatively, the next time you buy one, i want you to keep track of how long until it gets a hole in it, or until you're wearing it shivering in the fall thinking, 'man, i'm cold.'

my family members have textiles handed down from their parents that are not only still in nearly perfect condition, but still do their jobs - keeping you warm, or dry, and have no more wear and tear than is easy to fix with medium knowledge of knitting, crocheting, and sewing. the same knitted queen-size blanket has basically been my mother's prized possession having kept her warm through her childhood in a house with no heating through homelessness to now, and it's basically the same as the day she got it. i don't have a blanket that i can say that about. hell, i don't even have a jacket or cardigan i can say that about.

solving this problem is getting meaningfully more and more challenging to locate - you need to have a semi-local craftsman of textiles on hand for the hope of anything that lasts more than a year max AND keeps you warm. factory machine knits are liable to snag and unravel faster than any hand knits or hand-machine knits i've ever been given or made, and my god you cannot escape the acryllic without hopping in a car going 90mph to the nearest small-boutique and tiny storefront area of your town.

i'm not the first or last person to tell you fast fashion is killing the textiles industry, especially in america, but i cannot reiterate enough how much it's doing damage to knit items and woven items especially. because, true: why would you pay $100 - $140+ for a single finely made garment when you can buy something vaguely similar for $20-$30 and just replace it when it wears to tatters in a year or two?

i work minimum wage. that blanket i talked about earlier? that's my one expensive personal purchase for the month (two paychecks). i've no doubt it was a good purchase for me, and i will cherish it for years to come, but it's hard to justify that much expense for a single item - which in turn further devalues the work and materials going into making them, making them more and more difficult to produce without total losses and keeping a store afloat with these kinds of items is getting extraordinarily hard to do now.

whereas once in time tailors and knitters would still have a relatively solid clientbase for their pricepoint, it's becoming harder and harder to escape the pull of disposable textiles if you aren't making enough disposable income to start switching to longer-lasting items. they're literally being priced out of the market by inferior textiles that last a pitiful amount of time and don't even do their damn purpose.

and honestly, that's a shame. i love my kohls' blankets for $10, and all, but there's something terrifying about being unable to source quality wool garments easily anymore. i'm still thinking about those blankets. thinking about how when you quote a general cost of labor+materials for a knit item, people think you're crazy.

'why would you pay that much for a blanket, or gloves, or a sweater? i can just buy one for $20.'

sure, you can. i wonder how long it'll last, though.

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