is polyester bad? an honest answer from people who make clothes

When you need a garment to do something natural fibres do badly: shrug off creases, hold a pleat for good, float as a sheer overlay, keep a saturated colour, or come in on a budget.

• Travel and event wear. A dress that spends a day in a suitcase and has to look pressed at the other end. Polyester resists creasing in a way linen, cotton and silk simply don’t.
• Permanent pleats. Heat-set pleats stay in polyester through washing and wearing. In natural fibres they soften and fall out. If the design is a knife-pleated or sunray skirt, polyester is usually what makes it possible.
• Chiffon overlays and linings. Where the layer isn’t against your skin and drape matters more than breathability, polyester chiffon and lining do the job well and wear hard.
• Colour that stays. Polyester takes deep, bright dye and keeps it, wash after wash and in strong sun.
• Budget. A polyester satin gown at a fraction of the silk price is a legitimate choice, not a compromise to hide. Plenty of beautiful occasion dresses are polyester, and there’s nothing to apologise for.

When the fabric sits against your skin in the heat, or when the feel and breathability of the cloth are the whole point of the garment.

• Next-to-skin summer wear. Polyester doesn’t absorb moisture, so a fitted polyester dress in an Australian summer traps heat against you. Cotton, linen and silk let it go.
• Hot climates and heavy sweating. Beyond the warmth, polyester tends to hold odour in a way natural fibres don’t, and it can hang on through washing.
• Anywhere the hand is the point. A linen shirt-dress, a washed silk slip, a soft cotton everyday dress: these are chosen for how they feel and age. A polyester version looks similar on a hanger and wears like a different garment.

If that’s the piece you have in mind, our guide to designing with 100% linen is the natural-fibre companion to this one.

Satin is a weave, not a fibre. It describes how the threads are interlaced to make that smooth, shiny face, and it says nothing about what the threads are made of.

That’s why “satin dress” on a product page tells you almost nothing. It could be silk, polyester, viscose, acetate or a blend, at very different prices. It matters here because several MadeApt pieces come in satin, so this is the comparison we’d want put in front of us:

Neither column is the wrong answer. A bridesmaid dress worn once, outdoors, photographed all day, on a budget: polyester satin is a sensible choice. A slip dress you’ll wear against your skin for ten years: silk earns its price. What isn’t fine is not being told which one you’re buying.

Better than virgin polyester, yes. A solution, no.

Most recycled polyester is made from used plastic bottles. That avoids making new plastic from oil and generally takes less energy than producing virgin fibre, which is a real improvement and worth choosing when polyester is the right fabric anyway. Here’s what it doesn’t fix:

• It still sheds microfibres. Recycled polyester releases tiny plastic fibres in the wash, the same as virgin polyester does.
• It’s usually a one-way trip. A bottle can be recycled into another bottle, again and again. Once it becomes a garment, it rarely gets recycled a second time. Calling that “circular” is generous.
• It’s still not biodegradable. At the end of its life a recycled polyester dress behaves like any other polyester dress.

So: if the design calls for polyester, recycled is the better polyester. It isn’t a reason to choose polyester for a garment that would be better in cotton.

Here’s the part that gets less attention than it should. A garment made from one fibre, whether that’s pure cotton, pure wool or pure polyester, has at least a path to being recycled. A poly-cotton blend mostly doesn’t, because the two fibres have to be separated first, and that’s difficult and rarely done at scale. Blends are comfortable, cheap and everywhere, and they’re the hardest clothes to deal with when they wear out.

That makes mono-material choices matter more than the natural-versus-synthetic argument suggests. MadeApt is a member of Seamless, Australia’s national clothing stewardship scheme, which is about taking responsibility for the whole life of a garment, including the end of it. We’ve written more on why the end of a garment’s life is partly a data problem in circular fashion is also an information problem.

Two commitments, neither of them complicated. We tell you the fibre content of what your piece will be made in, in plain words, before anything is cut. And we say plainly which way we’d go: when polyester serves the design, we’ll say so without dressing it up, and when a natural fibre earns its price, we’ll tell you that too, including when it costs you more.

The made-to-order difference

A brand with a warehouse full of polyester dresses has a reason to tell you polyester is wonderful. We buy the cloth after you order, so we don’t have a fabric to talk you into.

You can browse what we work with on the fabrics page. And if you’d rather not decide at all, you don’t have to: tell us the occasion and whether you want the piece structured or flowy, and your tailor recommends the cloth. Already have a length of fabric you’re unsure about? Our guide to supplying your own fabric covers how a maker checks fibre content before cutting.

Frequently asked questions

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