Polyester, polyester everywhere, and not a stitch to savor? If cheap synthetic fabric blends currently dominate clothing racks, they may not be de rigueur for much longer. As Racked pointed out last month, growing calls for supply-chain transparency mean that materials are no longer the immaterial concerns they used to be.
Call it a side effect of our social media–obsessed era. With brands jockeying for attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace, the narrative behind a product has become nearly as relevant as the product itself. And what better proxies for intangible concepts like authenticity and quality than materials you can touch?
A number of brands, in fact, are not only positioning fabrics at the fore, but they’re also allowing themselves to be defined by them.