August 4, 2025 · AlabamaTHE NEW SEA FOOD: FASHION, WASTE, AND MICROPLASTICS
The following excerpt was published in the Southern Cultures “Future of Textiles” issue, guest edited by Natalie Chanin.
Fashion Eater
The Sea’s New Food
by Makalé Cullen
The future of fashion is inside of us. We will—we are—wearing nanofibers internally, purchased not from a rack, but at the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s, the restaurant. Our identities, which we have adorned with plant and animal fibers for more than three hundred thousand years, will no longer only drape over us, they will become us—worn inside. Meet Fashion Eater.
Fashion is a watery business. Textile manufacturing has always used copious amounts of water to prepare plant and protein fibers for use as textiles. But we’ve entered a new age where the cyclical nature of our planet’s ecosystem means that after decades of serving as a repository of our waste, it has incorporated our textile inputs and is feeding them back to us, over and over again, at the nano level.
The global textile industry is a $1.7 trillion behemoth responsible for clothing billions of people. Yet its meteoric growth has come with significant ecological costs. Central among these is the issue of synthetic microfibers—tiny fragments of polyester, nylon, and acrylic that escape into waterways during laundering and industrial processes. These fibers are accumulating in the world’s oceans at an alarming rate, infiltrating marine ecosystems and entering the food chain. The fish and mollusks consuming these fibers have become unwitting participants in a complex ecological crisis, one that underscores the need for an urgent reevaluation of textile production, consumption, and waste management.
The future of textiles is so deep at sea that I feel the need to take a futurist twist on biologist Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis, which is an evolutionary mechanism of hereditary symbiosis. We, and our kin in the sea, are evolving in a plastic world we never anticipated. We are becoming plastic. Synthetic polymers and the chemicals of textile dyes are insistently, indestructibly on the rack and on the plate.
Read the full essay on Project Muse, or purchase the full issue.
Fast Fashion Timeline
by Makalé Cullen
The following timeline has been lightly condensed. See a full version in the Southern Cultures “Future of Textiles” issue.
1990s: Early Foundations of Fast Fashion
Fashion retailers Zara and H&M pioneered rapid “design-to-rack” cycles emphasizing speed and efficiency. Design-to-store time was reduced from months to weeks. Polyester, popular since its invention in 1935 by DuPont, retained its appeal as inexpensive, durable, and easy to blend with other fibers, making it ideal for fast fashion to emerge as a lucrative business model.
Early 2000s: The Fast Fashion Boom and the Rise of Secondhand Exports
Fast fashion is widely adopted across Europe and the United States. Polyester continued to dominate due to its low cost, versatility, and ease of printing and dyeing. Other synthetics, like nylon and spandex, were used to achieve trendy, stretchy, and fitted designs. Blends with cellulosic fibers, like viscose, were also popular, creating softer, more breathable fabrics that mimicked the feel of natural fibers. The flexibility of synthetic and cellulosic blends allowed brands to experiment with styles and adapt quickly to emerging trends, accelerating clothing production and discard cycles.
2010s: Peak Fast Fashion
Social media and influencer culture accelerated clothing and textile trend cycles, pushing new looks and microtrends with unprecedented speed. Cheap to produce, polyester and nylon textiles continued to dominate. Newer cellulosic fibers, such as modal and lyocell, were introduced as more eco-friendly options, though synthetic blends remained dominant. Polyester blends were heavily used for stretchy apparel, such as leggings and sports bras, while modal and viscose mimicked the natural fabrics of apparel produced by companies like Patagonia, Tentree, Gap, and Madewell.
Late 2010s–Early 2020s: Fast Fashion Critique and Sustainability Push
While fast fashion continued to thrive, a renewed attention to its environmental and social impacts led to a shift. Sustainable and “slow fashion” brands reemerged as alternatives, though the fast-fashion market still grew through online platforms like Shein, which employs an “ultra-fast” model that produces clothing at an even faster rate using sophisticated algorithms to get new styles to market in a matter of days. Some fast-fashion brands begin using recycled polyester and promoting “eco-friendly” fibers like organic cotton and Tencel (the brand name for modal and lyocell). High rates of consumption, wage earning gaps, and loss of quality manufacturing persist.
Makalé Cullen is an ecologist and experience designer with expertise in place-based research, design, and cultural partnerships. Specializing in ethnobotanical research and community-driven projects, she has worked with the Toyota Research Institute, Drexel University, and the New York Botanical Garden. Her forthcoming book, about Manhattan’s Highbridge Park, is titled NOASIS.
Illustrations by Iris Gottlieb.