Queueing for nylon.
From the archive · Where the fabric comes from
Before nylon, a swimsuit was knitted from wool, and it got heavier every time you went in.
The big knitting mills in Portland, Oregon made them by the thousand. They were warm, they sagged, and they took the rest of the afternoon to dry.
Nylon came out of a DuPont laboratory in the thirties and went on sale as stockings in May 1940. Then the war took all of it for parachutes. When it came back, people queued for it, like the line at Millers in Oak Ridge.
By the fifties nylon had gone swimming. The adverts promised fast-drying suits, with rubber-cored thread knitted in for the stretch. Spandex followed from the same company and went on sale as Lycra in 1962. A swimsuit has been nylon and elastane more or less ever since.
Fishing nets are nylon too. Lost at sea, they keep drifting and catching for years. Since 2011 a plant in Ljubljana has been taking nets like these, with fabric offcuts and old carpet, back to the raw ingredient and spinning it into new yarn. It's called ECONYL®, and it's what our swimwear is made of.
So some of it has been to sea already. We only drew the shapes.
Written by the founder.
