Greenwashing sucks but I think recycled polyester is especially egregious.
Back in 2019, I had a really irritating boss. This guy was the worst. I remember the first time we met, he told me he doesn’t wear leather because he’s a vegetarian, and that’s why he only wears Converse sneakers. He wanted his preferred brand of footwear to be the first impression I had of him. Weird behaviour.
I get that he meant it as a shorthand signifier for his ethics — but like, Converse is owned by Nike. I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who believed supporting Nike to be a principled position. The whole thing felt so hollow, he didn’t seem to care about the difference between sartorial choices and praxis. It was fascinating to see someone who obviously thought himself to be a moral actor be so transparently superficial.
Without principles, you’ll always be chasing trends
In my day job, I’m a UX designer. The first thing we do on every project is define our design principles. These are brief little statements that capture the values that guide our work. If there’s a disagreement, we come back to our principles to resolve the conflict. If we’re unsure of the right direction, we use our principles to guide us.
Principles allow us to focus on what’s important. They prevent us from being distracted by every shiny new thing that hits the market. Designers who are trying to copy Apple’s Liquid Glass UI update now, will find their work looks wildly dated after this transparency trend is over.
You can tell when principles were absent from decisions. People contradict the things they say they value. Bands release music that sound like someone else. Studios film movies that are all remakes and retellings. Fashion labels design collections that have no connection to their codes.
Allbirds is AI birds now
Allbirds was a shoe company. Another one of those millennial direct-to-consumer brands that imploded in recent years. When they launched in 2015, Allbirds was touted as a sustainable company with high environmental, social, and governance standards. That wasn’t really true, Allbirds was sued for failing to deliver on their carbon offsetting commitments and misleading customers.
Forgive me if I’m skeptical that Allbirds was holding themselves accountable to any real climate goals.
Earlier in 2026, Allbirds decided to liquidate their shoe business and become an AI infrastructure company called Smartbirds. It was pretty baffling at first, but I think it’s a great example of a company without any real principles to base their decisions on. Allbirds wasn’t a sustainable brand because they were committed to eco-friendly shoes and carbon offsetting. Sustainability was a trend in 2015, and AI is a trend now. They’ll jump on the next trend, too. Get ready for Spacebirds in 10 years when space tourism becomes commercially viable.
What does this have to do with recycled polyester?
I’m not against synthetic fibres. I’m really not. Lycra and Nylon are great for activewear and water-resistant outerwear. Acetate makes a fab lining for blazers and coats (and is so much more economical than silk). I’ll even grant you that a little bit of acrylic or polyester makes wool coats and sweaters much more durable.
What I hate is brands charging premium prices for polyester. That was a big reason I stopped buying from Ted Baker. I used to love Ted, but by the end they were charging upwards of $500 CAD for 100% polyester dresses. Like, get a hold of yourselves. Amy Odell published a conversation with Eugene Rabkin in her BackRow newsletter recently. Rabkin said, “[p]rices for luxury fashion no longer have any meaningful connection to the cost of materials, labor, construction. They’re arbitrarily assigned signs that signify: This is luxury because this is expensive.” They were talking about a $1,000 Prada tank top, but the point still stands. Why are brands charging so much for bullshit?
I also hate fake sustainability. I wrote about the greenwashing of bamboo-based fabrics (TL;DR: bamboo fabric isn’t meaningfully eco-friendly). I’ve been observing a similar trend with recycled polyester. Polyester garments are shredded, melted, processed, and re-constituted to make new cloth. Granted, this is slightly better than creating brand new polyester, I just think pretending it’s an environmentally friendly practice is absurd. Polyester still sheds microplastics each time you wash it. And I think prolonging the demand for polyester clothing is a mistake.
I wouldn’t wear it, but I can think of a few good uses for recycled polyester. Like carpet and upholstery. Fibres that need to be durable, but don’t get washed too often so you don’t have to worry about microplastics leeching into the water supply.
We need to deal with our pollution problem for real
Allbirds sold a polyester shoe made from plastic bottles recovered from the ocean. It was marketed as a sustainable shoe saving the poor sea turtles or something. You can tell from my tone that I don’t buy it. I don’t think we can solve pollution by creating more disposable consumer products.
My favourite department store Simons (LYSM, Simons) has a sustainability program called Vision. A lot of it is really, really good, like instituting circular manufacturing processes that reduced their water use by 86% and carbon emissions by 46%. But some of it I don’t love, like how their sustainable panties for women are mostly recycled polyester and nylon. Please wear cotton panties, I beg you!
We need a real solution to our massive pollution problem in the west. Like, collect all the plastic and trash in the ocean and in landfills, and destroy it permanently. I have nothing constructive to offer to the conversation about how this could work in practice. I’m a writer, not a scientist. So while people much smarter than I am figure that out, I can do my part by wearing natural fibre clothing that’ll decompose instead of haunting our planet as forever chemicals until the heat death of the universe. That’s something, right?
Fashion Victim 