Experts are weighing in on wellness culture’s growing obsession with natural fibers and the rising number of people avoiding plastic-based clothing. For some shoppers, the shift is about comfort or quality; for others, it is tied to health fears, fertility concerns and a broader distrust of synthetic materials.
A few months ago, Lane Koch decided she would clear her family’s closets of all plastic-based fabrics and replace them with natural fibers such as cotton and linen. Koch, a longtime Republican political strategist and a former senior staffer on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign, had already spent years avoiding processed foods and, about a decade ago, had removed plastic cookware from her kitchen. But while she had paid close attention to what she put in her body, she said she had largely ignored what she put on her body.
That changed after she watched a Netflix documentary following six couples experiencing infertility as they reduced the amount of plastic in their lives while trying to get pregnant. By the end of the film, three of the pairs have a baby.
Koch is not trying to conceive, but she said the premise resonated with her.
“If plastic exposure has that big of an effect on people’s fertility, then certainly it must be affecting our health as well in different areas,”she thought.
Her concern sharpened a few days later when her three-year-old woke up sick while wearing polyester.
“I had this lightbulb moment,”Koch said,
“that I need to get her out of these pajamas.”
Scientists told me that any harms they would expect from plastic-based clothing would build up over many years, not appear overnight. Koch, however, said she was convinced. She said she doubted any study had exactly replicated the conditions her child experienced and questioned the incentives behind much scientific research.
After that, she cleared 90% of her closet. Her children had fewer synthetic items too, but she threw those out as well. She spent hundreds of dollars, mostly in secondhand stores, replacing bedding with 100% cotton sheets and buying new socks, underwear and pajamas.
“We ‘microdose poison in a thousand different respects every single day’,”she told me.
“Now she was done with synthetic fabrics.”
How did fabric content become an obsession?
Over the past few years, awareness of fabric content has spread among shoppers. Social posts asking,
“When did you start caring about fabric content?”have circulated widely, along with declarations such as
“I can’t stop reading labels now.”Searches related to natural fibers began to spike on Google and have continued to rise. Elena Karpova, a professor of consumer apparel-retail studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, said that in a recent unpublished study, one of her graduate students found fabric content was a major factor influencing gen Z shoppers. Brands have responded to the trend, and mainstream retailers such as Gap and J Crew now allow online shoppers to filter by material.
For many people, the concern is aesthetic. As fast fashion has proliferated and retailers have cut costs, clothing quality has declined, and shoppers are looking for ways around it. Choosing natural fibers is one option, although it is not a cure-all. Clothing quality depends on many factors, including construction, but construction is difficult to assess. Part of the appeal of
“natural fibers only”, according to Hanna Lee, an assistant professor at the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, is that it is easy for anyone to check and simple for brands to advertise.
As demand for natural-fiber clothing has grown, it has attracted a different set of supporters, including people like Koch whose goals are less about style and more about health — and even politics. Now, wellness-obsessed men concerned about their virility are switching from synthetic fabrics, and the conservative women’s magazine argued that readers should dress in
“natural fiber staples”rather than synthetic fabrics, which it claimed
“mess with your hormones”.The sentiment aligns with the rise of Maha; a recent Maha report on children’s health even mentioned the issue.
These concerns have spread on social media, where many people say they get their health information. Posts warning that synthetic clothing is harmful are designed to trigger strong reactions and are exactly the kind of sensational content algorithms favor. The trend has become a microcosm of modern wellness culture: a complicated scientific issue reduced to exaggerated claims that erode trust and encourage people to buy more products.
What are the real health impacts of plastic-based clothing?
Concerns about plastic-based clothing do have some basis. As many people know, plastic production is harmful to the environment and to human health, said Phil Landrigan, a biology and public health professor at Boston College who co-authored . But most of that damage does not come from people wearing the clothes; plastic-caused sicknesses and deaths are largely the result of workplace accidents and of diseases linked to emissions and pollution, he said.
The potential risks of wearing synthetic materials are less immediate and harder to measure. In this area, scientists are more concerned about the chemicals used to treat the clothing than about the plastic itself. Those chemicals can include phthalates, bisphenols, Pfas and brominated flame retardants, and they have been linked to health outcomes such as , , and .
A link is not the same as a cause, however, and for those chemicals to affect us, our skin would have to absorb them. That is possible, but it is generally less risky than other routes of exposure. Sheela Sathyanarayana, a professor of pediatrics at Seattle children’s hospital who studies endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastics, said in an email that she is more concerned about plastic in food and cookware, as well as personal care products such as creams and perfumes.
For some people, the main route of exposure may be a water source, said Audrey Gaskins, a professor at Emory University studying how the environment affects fertility. Much depends on a person’s lifestyle and environment, Gaskins said, but
“dermal absorption is probably not the average person’s primary exposure to these chemicals”.
Certain conditions can make skin more absorbent. Mohamed Abdallah, an environmental chemistry professor at the University of Birmingham, said he and his colleagues found people were at greater risk when they were sweating. Even so, he said he could not put a number on the size of that risk. Quantifying the overall danger of wearing synthetics would be impossible, he said, because many factors affect how much the skin absorbs.
“What’s the chemical we’re talking about?”Abdallah asked.
“How much of it has been added to this fabric? How long has this piece of clothing been worn? What type of exercise has been going on, and for how long?”
These factors accumulate over a lifetime and interact with other exposures.
“It’s not a case of acute toxicity,”Abdallah said. No one will do one gym session in a pair of plastic leggings and
“fall ill immediately”,he said, which makes the issue difficult to measure.
None of the scientists I spoke to avoided synthetic fabrics entirely, but many said they limited them. During our interview, Landrigan wore mostly natural fibers, but also a fleece vest made from nylon flock; he believes there is a strong case for avoiding synthetics given the harms of plastic production. Abdallah said he had embraced cotton in the gym, sweat spots and all, and Sathyanarayana had also changed her workout gear and underwear.
While all agreed that wearing natural fibers could not hurt and was likely the lowest-risk route, none seemed especially concerned about the synthetics still in their closets.
When I asked Sathyanarayana about claims that clothing is making people sick and driving modern infertility, she was direct.
“There is no evidence to support this right now,”she wrote.
“There is evidence to support that these chemicals are harmful, but we are likely getting most of them from other sources.”
Why do people distrust the ‘unnatural’?
Although the research includes many caveats, Gaskins said she understands
“why people have connected the dots.”Colleen Derkatch, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and the author of Why Wellness Sells, said that in her work on wellness culture, one theme comes up repeatedly:
“People are really worried that everyday life is steeped in hazardous chemicals.”
Advice to buy natural is persuasive because it acknowledges that fear and offers a solution. The appeal is also rooted in a long history of valuing the natural and rejecting the unnatural, said Alan Levinovitz, a professor at James Madison University and the author of Natural.
At first glance, buying natural fibers and discarding rayon and nylon may seem harmless, and in many cases it largely is, aside from the waste and any unnecessary shopping that may follow.
But the motivations behind the choice may point to something deeper. Believing your clothes are making you sick may reflect a broader conviction that
“the systems that are in place to protect us have failed”, Levinovitz explained. That fear, he said,
“opens us up to all kinds of vulnerabilities”,including the possibility of hearing public figures say:
“They tricked you about the clothes. Guess what else they’re tricking you about?”
According to Derkatch and Levinovitz, wearing natural fibers can be a way to reclaim agency in a confusing and often threatening world. Alli Walker, a singer and songwriter based in Nashville, said that for years she struggled with irritable bowel syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS, formerly known as PCOS), and doctors never seemed able to help her symptoms. She then visited a functional medicine doctor, who ordered blood tests, prescribed supplements and recommended that she examine every toxin she may have encountered.
That advice put Walker’s health back in her own hands. After the appointment, she said she
“spent day and night researching everything: what is the healthiest version of every single thing that I touch in my life?”She removed synthetics from her closet, except for the costumes she must wear when she performs, and bought a few new natural-fiber basics, though she limited her shopping.
“Once you get into one side of this ‘non-toxic life’, there is no turning back,”she told me.
“It’s almost like a hobby for me to get healthier and healthier.”
She does not identify as part of Maha — she said she had not heard of it — and she is uncertain about the strongest claims made about synthetics. Her reason for choosing natural fibers over plastics is simple:
“If there’s another option, why not take it?”In the future, she hopes to replace her synthetic rugs with wool and her vinyl flooring with wood.
For Koch, the effort to optimize her own health and her family’s health is still ongoing. In the long term, she wants a house-wide water filtration system, and for now she plans to get a snake plant for air purification. She said she values wellness partly because she had her youngest child in her late 30s and is nearly 20 years older than some of the other children’s parents. She does not want age to hold her back from being an active parent or prevent her daughter from having a rich childhood.
When it comes to her own health, Koch said she knows there is much she cannot control: not the pesticides her neighbors use, nor pollution in the water supply. She also said she has lost trust that any
“three-letter agency”would keep her safe.
“But I can control the things I put on my body,”she said. What she wears may not have a
“life or death”impact, she admitted, but if it offers even a small chance of better health, then for her it is
“worth it”.
Kate Cray is a freelance writer, reporter and editor based in Brooklyn, New York, who writes about how we live now, broadly defined.
