The Waste-Free World by Ron Gonen

Author:Ron Gonen [Gonen, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

The First Miracle Fiber

DuPont proclaimed the wondrous new fabric was made simply of coal residuals, air, and water, but there was nothing simple, or natural, about its creation. Harvard chemistry professor Wallace H. Carothers was lured to the company to head up a team of 230 scientists who worked for eleven years on the project, discovering a means of artificially stringing together long chains of molecules, called polymers, that could be woven into fabric. DuPont also spared no expense in hyping nylon’s revolutionary qualities, putting stockings front and center at its 1939 World’s Fair exhibit. The fair featured many lavish futuristic displays, such as Westinghouse’s seven-foot-tall talking robot, Elektro, which boasted a seven-hundred-word vocabulary and professed to gawking crowds, “My brain is bigger than yours.” But DuPont’s nylon exhibit nonetheless snared global media attention. The booth featured seamstresses cranking out nylons, which female models not only wore but played tug of war with to demonstrate the fabric’s strength. Nylons were “strong as steel,” DuPont claimed.

While some press coverage doubted nylons would catch on, noting condescendingly that “it’s difficult to tell about female psychology,” women were thrilled. Advertised as “so durable that they resist runs and even cigarette burns,” a limited run of four thousand pair of nylons went on sale in 1939 in six select stores in Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont is headquartered. Women lined up for blocks and the stock sold out within three hours. The original name of the fabric was nuron, which a manager of DuPont’s Nylon Division explained was “no run” written backward. (A trademark for that name owned by another firm forced the change.) One woman reportedly asked a salesperson how many years a pair would last, and some accounts by women of the day attest to the stocking’s staying power. Grace Lyons later told a reporter, “They were like iron. They’d last for a year.” So why do they run so readily now? Because at some point DuPont reportedly instructed its chemists to find a way to make them less run-resistant. Planned obsolescence strikes again!

Certainly, nylon can be made extraordinarily strong, which is why the U.S. military mandated that DuPont stop making stockings and repurpose all the fabric into producing parachutes and tents during World War II. The resultant stocking shortage led to so-called nylon riots when they went back on sale in 1945, with crowds of ten thousand and more women descending on shopping hubs all around the country. The worst incident occurred when a crowd of forty thousand stocking seekers in Pittsburgh competed for thirteen thousand pairs a small boutique had at last been able to procure. As author Susannah Handley writes in Nylon: The Story of a Fashion Revolution, “in all the history of textiles, no other product has enjoyed the immediate, overwhelming public acceptance of DuPont nylon.”

The environmental implications of clothing produced from fossil fuel didn’t entirely escape notice, with one reporter chastising, again with sexist condescension, “If you’re wearing those new nylon stockings, girls, you’re carrying around more coal dust than a miner.

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