Nylon: The Story of a Fashion Revolution (review)

Nylon: The Story of a Fashion Revolution. By Susannah Handley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. 192. $29.95.

For those who assume nylon's greatest contribution to the sartorial world to have been the introduction of synthetic stockings to eager North American female consumers in 1938, Nylon offers a far more elaborate account of the manmade fiber's relation to fashion, from ready-made to couture design. While the Philadelphia Record of 10 November 1938 called "Du Pont's New Fibre More Revolutionary Than Martian Attack," Susannah Handley refers to the impact of nylon in equally dramatic terms: a "silent synthetic revolution [that] has swept through every territory within fashion's vast empire, overturning its traditions and scattering confusion throughout the hierarchical system" (p. 7).

Although this colorfully illustrated book is based in part on the DuPont archives, Handley avoids attributing the development of synthetic fibers to any particular manufacturer. Rather, she reveals the complex process by which an array of manmade fabrics was devised and incorporated into existing traditions or used to challenge tradition.

Handley traces the origins of the first manmade fiber, "artificial silk" (in 1885) through the popularization of nylon-derived fabrics in postwar fashions, to the "smart" fabrics and wearable technologies in contemporary designer collections. She refers to the constant mediation between manufacturers, designers, and consumers in Britain and the United States. The Courtauld's Textile Company, for example, built its initial commercial success on providing fabrics such as black crepe that were in keeping with the nineteenth-century rituals and fashions generated around death. As the popularity of these materials began to wane, along with the cult of mourning, Courtauld's canny decision to acquire the patents and licenses for the British rights to the "viscose" process, used in the making of artificial silk—later known as rayon—made it one of the most influential manufacturers of synthetic textiles in the twentieth century.

While initially imitative of traditional fabrics, synthetic materials eventually became an integral part of a cultural revolution. Handley links the "democratizing" force of a substance that challenged stable hierarchies with the breakdown of fixed class structure of British culture. Manmade fibers, with their short and highly adaptable cultural history, provided the ideal means through which designers could explore new forms (from synthetic pink "fun furs" to polyvinyl chloride "wet look" mini-dresses) easily taken up in the context of shifting gender and class relations.

Throughout her book, Handley tells how textile manufacturers constantly sought to preempt the potential of new fibers and then adapt to unforeseen alterations generated by changing consumer interpretations and tastes. This might be enacted in a literal way, as in the commissioning of a survey in 1958 by the British nylon spinners, which set out to define the correlation between the purchase of nylon blouses and social status. Consumers were shown photographs of housing types indicative of contemporary definitions of working-class, lower-middle-class, and middle-class groups and asked: "Do you think a woman living here would buy a nylon blouse?" According to the perceptions of the interviewees, nylon was considered to be high in the social hierarchy of fabrics and most suitable for the inhabitant of a respectable detached home.

Toward the end of the 1980s, however, "miracle fabric" synthetics had become the byword for low taste within Western fashion culture. Polyester, as one commentator put it, was "unable to shake off its reputation as the clammy, sweaty and static-prone fabric of the disco era" (p. 117). The proliferation of leisure suits, hot pants, and Crimplene dresses had led to a massive oversaturation of the market. In response, major fiber producers such as DuPont and ICI desperately sought to bolster the fashion image of such fabrics by enlisting designers such as Mary Quant to create home-dressmaking patterns for a mass market.

While Nylon draws attention to the fluctuating meanings and manifestations of synthetics, it lacks an overarching explanatory...