Hi everyone, its Justine. Last time, we talked about natural fibers. Today
let's move on to synthetic ones or artificial ones.
They are man-made and they don't come from natural raw materials or they're processed in a very
chemical way.
You'll see that the definition is not always so black and white between natural and not natural. Basically the bad thing about
synthetic fibers is that it's not natural.
The good thing is since you're actually creating the fiber you're gonna make the yarn with later,
you can actually decide everything in terms of look and feel about that fiber, so you have many many more options
versus natural fibers.
Let's go through the main types of synthetic fibers. First off rayon. Rayon was the first manufactured fiber.
It appeared about a hundred years ago. Technically it comes from wood pulp
but the whole process afterwards is chemical - every step.
So usually it gets classified under the artificial fibers; some people say it's a natural one. It's discussed, um,
however you want to put it.
So basically you take that wood pulp turn it into a kind of compound. You dissolve that compound, you get kind of dough -
you put that dough into a press like the pasta press.
You know you put the dough, you press and spaghetti comes out? It's the same process to get
rayon filaments that you're gonna build your yarn with. Rayon was created as an alternative to silk.
It's much cheaper.
And it was used in linings inside the garment so you put silk outside
rayon inside to make the garment overall more affordable, and you don't see the inside anyways.
That was the theory to make clothing really more accessible to more people. It is shiny,
bit like silk, it wrinkles a lot.
It usually needs dry-cleaning and it cannot be ironed.
But it was a start. Then came acetate in the 20's. Acetate is thermoplastic,
so if you heat it up, you can shape it the way you want.
For example, if you shape pleats in acetate fabric, when you wash the fabrics the pleats
will stay, so that's the cool thing. It's also very, very cheap. I think it's the cheapest fabric
I know. It's cheaper than rayon, cheaper than polyester, cheaper than everything else. So it will be used
typically on cheap evening gowns or prom dresses that are supposed to look shiny.
They have lots of fabrics, but still very cheap price point.
It reacts to heat so it cannot be ironed.
It is very shiny, but in fact so shiny that by looking at the luster on the surface
You can tell that it's not real silk. I don't work with acetate myself. I find it very hard to care for. It doesn't
stand light so much so the color will go
weird.
It doesn't react well to heat and it cannot be ironed.
It's a bit complicated, so I prefer not to use Acetate in my work.
I don't have a swatch to show you. Then, just before World War 2,
nylon appeared. When you said, " I got new nylons" it meant "I bought tights."
Tights are a very finely knitted fabric made in nylon. It's a very flexible knit, so here the invention is
the way of knitting that finely, plus a brand new material. It was groundbreaking at that time.
It is strong and a good windbreaker so old raincoats and active wear used to be made in
nylon before better fibers appeared. And the parachutes in World War 2 were also in nylon.
It was really a revolutionary fabric, extremely resistant. One note about the breathability -
terrible and a bad breathability. You know when you wear tights all day, and you take off your shoes at night?
You know what I mean. In the 50's,
polyester was the new thing. If you've seen Saturday Night Fever, the suits were polyester. All of them.
Polyester is hydrophobic - it hates water
so it doesn't retain it, which means that it doesn't wrinkle,
at all. How practical is that? That was a revolution again in the 50's. You
wash your garments, take it out of the machine, it's dry already. You can put it on immediately.
That's why it was called the magical wash and wear fabric.
Polyester is strong and flexible, so it's great when mixed with other more fragile fibers.
It makes the overall mix super strong and flexible. So it's actually good
fabric to mix with something else. The problem of polyester is that it's oliophilic: it likes oil, so it retains the oil.
So in oily stain when you're cooking with the polyester shirt on,
for instance, it's gonna be super hard to remove. If you have oily skin
or if you sweat a lot, the same phenomenon happens, you might notice that under the armpits, for example, on tight garments it marks.
That's why I don't usually use
100% polyester. I prefer to mix that with other fibers really, unless it's microfiber, because then it's a whole different ballgame.
It's much better polyester. It's improved polyester is also already 60 years old right?
It kept improving, of course, so microfiber is a different thing and it can be extremely breathable.
For instance,
Gore-tex uses a membrane that's kind of a cousin, an evolution of polyester.
It is waterproof, it is breathable, and it is windproof at the same time. So today
we have versions of polyester that are brilliant and are used in outerwear with great success. This blue fabric, for instance, is polyester.
It is a satin weave.
We've seen that in the previous episode so that's why the correct side here is a lot shinier than the other side -
but that's because of the weaving technique. It's pretty flexible. It's pretty breathable.
I've done a skirt with that and I use this fabric as the lining this one is
cheaper polyester.
And it's actually mesh, so the basis is a tight knit and the surface is honey comb knitted, very airy. In between,
you even have kind of a foam effect.
That's typically something you couldn't do with natural fibers only. But it's pretty stiff,
so let's compare it with the other one which is also 100% polyester, but a more
advanced one. This one is a lot more flexible,
I definitely feel it -
but I think you can even see it on camera.
Acrylic, created in the 50's too, is an alternative to wool. In fact, it often gets mixed with wool
to make a garment overall cheaper and all lighter because acrylic fibers are lighter than wool fibers. It feels
almost like wool, not as well, but
close if it's good acrylic. And it can also feel like wool - that's the bad side.
It will adapt to the outside temperature and humidity, just like wool does, so it will become warmer when you need more warmth.
It's also a good winter option if you don't like to wear animal hairs.
Acrylic is completely animal free, if you're a vegan for instance, the only thing is it won't
feel a
hundred percent as good as wool, if that makes sense. Then spandex. That's basically rubber.
You don't see garments made 100 percent in spandex. It's rather just a few percents to make
stiffer fibers stretchier. For instance, yoga pants that need to stretch a lot,
have a couple of percent spandex. It's rarely more than 10 percent, it's usually 2 to 5 percent.
Jeans that are stretchy, skinny jeans, can be 95% cotton 5%
spandex, otherwise given the shape they have, you wouldn't be able to get in. You need that spandex.
You don't see it when you look at the fabric up close because it's usually in the middle. You have
one core yarn of spandex, of rubber, and then they wrap
cotton for example, around it so what you will see is the cotton, you only feel it if you pull. And it...
you can pull so much more than without. That, you know, okay, there is spandex in there.
The bad thing about rubber, if it's cheap rubber, which you can't tell when you purchase it, is that over time it will
eventually become stiffer,
over time anyways,
but even more if you use it more, if you pull on it. You notice that on old underwear where the elastic is in
stiffer and doesn't bounce back anymore. If you pull, you will hear click click click click, that's the rubber... breaking.
Those are the main synthetic fibers.
But science keeps improving so we are getting more and more improved variations of those things. For instance, poly-acrylic,
poly-amide.
One more that I want to show you, because it's used to make fake fur and it's fun, is called mod-acrylic.
This is fake fur so the hairs are completely artificial, the basis at the back is woven.
It doesn't even have to be the same fiber and here you see the difference very clearly.
This one is material for one fluffy sweater. Let me tell you, it's in
fully acrylic and polyester. The back is a knitted structure.
People wear a lot more knits than they think and even fake fur can be knitted.
So if you open your closet, I bet that you have at least 50% of garments that are actually knitted structures.
That's it for the main synthetic fibers, a very quick overview. Really there are
many more things that I could talk about but the video would get really really long. As I said,
I don't use synthetic fibers completely alone. One sort
I mix several ones or I mix synthetic fibers with natural fibers
to get fabric qualities that are extremely stable and feel great on the skin. So mixes are what I prefer. Next time,
I'll show you some mixes and I must have at least a thousand interesting swatches -
I pick up this stuff. Thumbs up if you enjoyed the video and subscribe to my channel by clicking on the red button somewhere
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New videos every Wednesday and Sunday on everything related to fashion. So, see you soon. Take care. Bye.