A few months ago, Lane Koch made a decision: she would purge 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 who was a senior staffer on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign, has long avoided processed foods and rid her kitchen of plastic cookware about a decade ago. But, for all that she cared about what she put in her body, she told me she had paid little attention to what she put on her body.
Then she watched The Plastic Detox, a Netflix documentary following six couples experiencing infertility, who reduce the amount of plastic in their lives as they try to get pregnant. By the end of the film, three of the pairs have a baby.
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Koch isn’t trying to conceive, but the idea resonated. “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.
That concern was on her mind when, a few days later, her three-year-old woke up sick – and happened to be wearing polyester. “I had this lightbulb moment,” Koch said, “that I need to get her out of these pajamas.”
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Scientists told me that any dangers they’d expect from plastic-based clothing would accumulate over many years, not overnight. But Koch was convinced. She said she doubted any study had exactly reproduced the conditions her child experienced – and anyway, she questioned the incentives behind much scientific research.
After that, she cleared 90% of her closet. Her kids had fewer synthetic items, but she tossed those too. She spent hundreds of dollars, mostly at secondhand stores, replacing their bedding with 100% cotton sheets and buying new socks, underwear and PJs. We “microdose poison in a thousand different respects every single day”, she told me. Now she was done with synthetic fabrics.
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How fabric content became an obsession
Over the past few years, a heightened awareness of fabric content has spread among shoppers. “When did you start caring about fabric content?” a popular Reddit post reads. “I can’t stop reading labels now.” Searches related to natural fibers began to spike on Google in 2024 and have risen since. Elena Karpova, a professor of consumer apparel-retail studies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, told me that, in a recent unpublished study, one of her graduate students found that fabric content was a major factor influencing gen Z shoppers. Brands have picked up on the hype, and now mainstream stores like Gap and J Crew let online shoppers filter by material.
For many, this concern is aesthetic. As fast fashion has proliferated and retailers have cut costs, clothing quality has deteriorated. Consumers have noticed the decline and are searching for a way around it. Opting for natural fibers is one solution, though it’s not a cure-all. Clothing quality is defined by lots of factors, including construction. But construction is complicated to evaluate. 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’s simple for anyone to check and easy for brands to advertise.
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As the hunger for natural fiber clothing has grown, it’s found a new group of supporters in people like Koch, whose aims aren’t so much sartorial as they are health-focused – even political. Now, wellness-obsessed men, concerned about their virility, are switching from polyester to cotton underwear. The conservative women’s magazine Evie recommended that readers dress in “natural fiber staples” rather than synthetic fabrics, which, it claimed, “mess with your hormones”. The sentiment dovetails with the rise of Maha; a recent Maha report on children’s health even mentioned the dangers of microplastics in clothing.
These fears have taken off on social media, where half of adults under 50 say they get their health information. Countless TikTokers are asserting that our clothes are making us sick – exactly the type of sensational content that algorithms thrive on. The phenomenon has become a microcosm of modern wellness culture: a complicated scientific issue flattened into exaggerated claims that erode trust and drive people to buy more stuff.
The real health impacts of plastic-based clothing
Worries about plastic-based clothing do have some basis. As many people know, plastic production is deleterious to our environment and health, said Phil Landrigan, a biology and public health professor at Boston College who co-authored an international report on the topic. But the lion’s share of that harm doesn’t come from people wearing the clothes; plastic-caused sicknesses and deaths are primarily a mixture of workplace accidents and diseases resulting from emissions and pollution, he said.
The potential dangers of wearing synthetic materials are less immediate and harder to quantify. Here, scientists are less concerned about plastic in the clothing than any chemicals used to treat it. Those chemicals, which can include phthalates, bisphenols, Pfas and brominated flame retardants, are toxic, and have been linked to health outcomes like cancer, heart attacks, infertility and immune suppression.
But a link isn’t the same as a cause, and for the chemicals to hurt us, our skin would have to absorb them. That’s possible, but it’s generally less risky than other modes of exposure. Sheela Sathyanarayana, a professor of pediatrics at Seattle children’s hospital who researches endocrine-disrupting chemicals in plastics, told me in an email that she was more worried about plastic in food and cookware, as well as personal care products, such as creams and perfumes.
For some, the primary route of exposure to these chemicals might be a water source, said Audrey Gaskins, a professor at Emory University studying how the environment affects fertility. So much varies based 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 circumstances can make skin more absorbent. Mohamed Abdallah, an environmental chemistry professor at the University of Birmingham, told me he and his colleagues conducted a study that found people were at greater risk when they were sweating. Still, he wasn’t able to put a number on the magnitude of that risk. He said quantifying the overall danger of wearing synthetics would be impossible, since many different 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 build up over a lifetime and intermingle 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 it challenging to measure.
None of the scientists I spoke to avoided synthetic fabrics entirely, but many said that they limited them. During our interview, Landrigan wore mostly natural fibers, but also a fleece vest, made from nylon flock; he believes that, given the harms of plastic production, there’s a strong case for avoiding synthetics. Abdallah told me that he’d embraced cotton in the gym, sweat spots and all; Sathyanarayana had also switched up her workout gear and underwear.
While all agreed it didn’t hurt to wear natural fibers and that it was likely the lowest risk route, no one seemed too concerned about the synthetics remaining in their closets.
When I asked Sathyanarayana about claims that our clothes are making us sick and at the root of modern infertility, she was clear. “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.”
Our growing distrust of the ‘unnatural’
Although the research comes with plenty of asterisks, Gaskins gets “why people have connected the dots.” Colleen Derkatch, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and the author of Why Wellness Sells, told me that, in her work studying wellness culture, one point has come up again and again: “People are really worried that everyday life is steeped in hazardous chemicals.”
The advice to buy natural is compelling, because it acknowledges that fear and offers an answer. The solution it peddles also happens to be particularly powerful, Alan Levinovitz, a professor at James Madison University and the author of Natural, told me, drawing on a long history of worshipping the natural and rejecting the unnatural.
At first glance, buying natural fibers and tossing out rayon and nylon may seem harmless – potentially even beneficial. And, on its own, it largely is (aside from the waste and any superfluous shopping that may follow).
But the underlying motivations may signal something more serious. Believing your clothes are making you sick might reflect a larger belief that “the systems that are in place to protect us have failed”, Levinovitz explained. That fear “opens us up to all kinds of vulnerabilities”, he said – a possible gateway to public figures saying: “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 reassert agency in a confusing and often dangerous-feeling world. Alli Walker, a singer and songwriter based in Nashville, told me that for years, she struggled with conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS, formerly known as PCOS), and doctors never seemed able to address her symptoms. Then she visited a functional medicine doctor, who ordered blood tests, put her on supplements and recommended that she look into all the toxins she could have been exposed to.
That edict put Walker’s health back in her own hands. After the appointment, Walker said she “spent day and night researching everything: what is the healthiest version of every single thing that I touch in my life?” She purged her closet of synthetics (minus the costumes she has to wear when she performs) and bought a few new natural fiber basics, though she limited the 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 doesn’t identify as a part of Maha – she said she hadn’t heard of it – and isn’t sure about the most intense claims about synthetics. Her reasoning for wearing natural fibers instead of plastics is simple: “If there’s another option, why not take it?” Down the line, she is hoping to replace her synthetic rugs with wool, and her vinyl flooring with wood.
For Koch, the project of optimizing her and her family’s health is also ongoing. In the long term, she wants a house-wide water filtration system, but for now she’s planning on getting a snake plant for air purification. She values wellness so much, she said, in part because she had her youngest child in her late 30s and is nearly 20 years older than some of the other kids’ parents. She doesn’t want age to hold her back from being an active parent or to stop her daughter from having a rich childhood.
When it comes to her health, Koch knows there’s a lot she can’t control: not the pesticides her neighbors use, nor pollution in the water supply; she’s also lost trust that any “three-letter agency” would ever keep her safe.
“But I can control the things I put on my body,” she said. What she wears might not have a “life or death” impact, she admitted. But if it offers even a slim chance at greater health? For her, that’s “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.
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