TL;DR — Nylon was the first fully synthetic fibre, launched by DuPont in the 1930s and marketed as being made from "coal, air, and water." It's incredibly strong for its weight, stretches without snapping, and laughs at abrasion — which is why it dominates tights, swimwear, raincoats and backpacks. The catch: it's plastic, it sheds microfibres in the wash, and it'll outlive you in landfill. Traffic-light it red. But it's a red that genuinely earns its place when the job is tough.

Here's a question worth keeping in your back pocket at parties: what fabric was once advertised as being made from nothing but "coal, air, and water"?

That's a real DuPont marketing line from the 1930s. The fabric was nylon, and when it launched, it genuinely changed the world. The first fully synthetic fibre humans had ever made — not spun from a plant, not sheared from an animal, just engineered in a lab from a barrel of petroleum and a lot of cleverness. Let's talk about what that actually means in your wardrobe.

What Nylon Actually Is

Nylon is a synthetic polymer made from petroleum. Chemists call it a polyamide, which is a fancy way of saying "long repeating chains of nitrogen-carbon links." Those chains get melted down and extruded through tiny holes (the same way a pasta machine extrudes spaghetti), then stretched and cooled into thread.

That stretching is the magic step. It lines up the molecules end-to-end, and the resulting fibre is absurdly strong for how light it is. Pound for pound, nylon is stronger than steel cable. It also bounces back when you stretch it, which is exactly why your tights snap back to shape instead of bagging out at the knees.

The First True Miracle Fibre

When DuPont launched nylon stockings in 1939, women queued around the block. There were actual riots. People had spent their entire lives wearing silk hose that snagged if you looked at them sideways — and suddenly there was a synthetic that didn't ladder, didn't shred, and cost a fraction of the price. (We did a whole episode on the nylon riots in our Threads of Time series, by the way.)

Then the Second World War broke out, every scrap of nylon got diverted into parachutes and tyre cords, and the riots got considerably angrier. That's how good this fibre was. People rioted to get it and then rioted again when they couldn't.

Nylon is a genuine overachiever. Stronger than almost any other fibre for its weight, stretchy without snapping, shrugs off abrasion — which is exactly why it dominates the stuff that takes a beating.

Where Nylon Earns Its Place

The places nylon shows up in your wardrobe are the places that punish fabric:

  • Tights and hosiery — needs to stretch, snap back, and survive a fingernail.
  • Swimwear — chlorine eats most natural fibres for breakfast.
  • Activewear — stretch, sweat, abrasion, repeat.
  • Outdoor gear and backpacks — has to survive being dragged through brambles for a decade.
  • Raincoats — a tightly woven nylon shell is hard to beat for keeping rain out.
  • Toothbrush bristles — yes, really.

When nylon is doing one of those hard jobs — surviving the pool, the trail, the gym — it's earning its place. A nylon swimsuit will last you years. A cotton swimsuit would be a soggy puddle by the end of summer.

The Catch (It's Still Plastic)

Now the part we have to be honest about. Nylon is still a plastic, with all the things that come with that.

It sheds microfibres in the wash — every cycle releases hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic strands into the water system, and eventually into rivers, oceans, and — increasingly — our own bloodstreams. It doesn't breathe brilliantly, so it can leave you clammy in everyday wear. And at the end of its life, it'll sit in landfill for hundreds of years, slowly fragmenting but never really going away.

The energy footprint of making nylon is also rough. It's a petroleum derivative, so every metre of nylon fabric started life as crude oil, and the manufacturing process releases nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas roughly 300 times more potent than CO2.

The Traffic-Light Verdict

Red light. But it's a thoughtful red.

If nylon is in your swimsuit, your raincoat shell, your backpack, your tights, your climbing harness — fine. It's doing a job a natural fibre can't really do, or can't do as well, and the alternative is buying a worse product more often. That's a defensible plastic.

If it's in your everyday T-shirt, your office trousers, your bedsheets, or your "casual" blouse — second thoughts are reasonable. There's almost always a better fabric for that job (cotton, linen, wool, lyocell), and you're paying the microfibre tax for no real benefit.

The rule of thumb: nylon for hard jobs, naturals for soft ones. The label will tell you which one you're holding — if you're willing to flip the tag.

Check the Label Without Flipping the Tag

Fibr is a free Chrome extension that shows you the fabric composition of every garment — right on the product image — while you browse Zara, H&M, Mango and the rest. Green badge for naturals. Red badge for nylon and its plastic cousins. No clicking through to product pages, no squinting at tiny labels. Just buy on purpose.