Nonwoven polyethylene polymers are ripping open the fabric of fashion reality.
Design Development Concepts U.S.A., a 14-person fashion studio, sits at the top of a grimy flight of stairs off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan's Flatiron district. Savania Davies-Keiller, a 34-year-old British designer and partner in DDC, greets me inside the cluttered loft. A guy crammed into a corner works at a sewing machine. Designers wedged behind tables shape collars on Power Macs. Everyone is too busy to lift their heads: Fluidity in the computer business has nothing on the clothing trade, where some designers shift styles 12 times a year.
"We have this hungry baby which is the apparel market, and it's constantly screaming for the next new thing," says Davies-Keiller, leading me past shelves overflowing with shiny, aluminum-coated pants. "All the baby says is, We want the next best thing! We want innovation!"
She fishes into a clothes rack behind her and pulls out a deep-blue garment that's cut like a jean jacket. As the designer passes it to me, she flashes a pearly smile.
I grab the jacket and am immediately disoriented by its feathery weight - like being fooled when you pick up one of those foam rocks at the toy store. The material feels different from anything I've ever touched. It's neither cotton nor a familiar synthetic - more like a sheer and incredibly appealing plastic. Stranger still, the bright, glossy fabric is extremely tough - it won't stretch a millimeter and is water and wind resistant. I slip into the minimalist garment, and it crinkles around me like some sort of malleable body shield.
So long, nylon trench coat. The team at DDC embraces fabric innovations that challenge our preconceived notions about clothing, and it looks to companies like Neotis Studio, a startup within corporate giant DuPont, for the unorthodox materials. Dedicated to developing cutting-edge textiles, Neotis is producing wearable fabrics from an unusual resource: papery, often industrial materials known as nonwovens. Davies-Keiller thinks nonwovens can do everything that the standard, limp collection of threads does for clothing, and then some. "Nonwovens are technology that works with humanity," she says.
She gives me another sample - a light-blue collared shirt. The spare cloth seems to melt over my hand, as if it were fine cotton. Unlike the jacket, the shirt stretches, and it's as soft and welcoming as flannel.
Then Davies-Keiller rummages around in a thigh-high pile and picks out a bolt of nonwoven fabric. I'm tempted to bury my face in the soft, rich, green cloth. "Like velvet," she says, "velour!"
Nonwovens are neither woven (like denim) nor knit (like cotton T-shirts); they're the materials used in FedEx envelopes, as well as in paper towels and diapers. With a few historical exceptions, nonwoven clothing has, predictably, been anticouture: single-use pieces like ER scrubs and haz-mat coveralls. But a small group of fashion-forward designers and scientists is harnessing chemistry, engineering, and precision sewing processes to transform nonwovens - and possibly the clothing industry itself.
DDC fully expects such wearable technology to go mainstream. For years the studio - whose client list includes Barneys and singer Lauryn Hill - has designed clothes showcasing DuPont innovations. DDC put Kevlar, the fiber used in bulletproof vests, into everyday garments, and has coated clothes with Teflon. Such advancements make clothing more durable and wearable, but Davies-Keiller believes they're also a reflection of the broadening expectation that whatever we interact with should march relentlessly forward.
"This generation is so quick - we understand technology, we want it, we need it!" she says. "Whether it's the Internet or a Gore-Tex shell from the North Face, tech is the real product."
Not surprisingly, DDC saw the potential in nonwoven clothing before the Wilmington, Delaware-based chemical conglomerate did. In 1998, Davies-Keiller's business partner, Roberto Crivello, was intrigued by a garment bag made of a papery DuPont nonwoven. DDC bought several hundred yards of the material - called Tyvek - and mated it with a Lycra-based lining. The company tailored the white DuPont material into a line of clothes named Futura, priced the matching set at about $1,000, and sold it in the studio's Lower East Side boutique. DDC found it couldn't keep Futura in stock.
"We were sitting there with our mouths open," says Davies-Keiller.
Before Neotis formally existed, but nearly a year after Futura debuted, DuPont struck a deal with DDC to provide input on the manufacturer's nonwoven fabrics.
Last March, DDC and Neotis got proof that they were on to something. Most of the 12-person Neotis staff, along with Davies-Keiller and Crivello, schlepped their new textiles to a Paris trade show to impress the apparel industry. Before long, the 10- by 15-foot Neotis booth was a mosh pit. The startup had 74 percent more requests for samples than at the previous show. DKNY took fabric. Calvin Klein's folks appeared. French designer François Girbaud stopped by.
"In our world, all we see is the same spinning and knitting with different treatments," says Stefano Aldighieri, director of fabrics and finishing for the Levi's brand, which has successfully launched a small run of Neotis clothes. "Neotis is a vision of what fabrics will be 10, 20, 30 years from now."
Davies-Keiller didn't enjoy being overrun at the show - "They were grabbing the bloody swatches from the walls!" - but she loved the reaction.
"When you see your peers responding that way, you do somersaults," she says. "I was watching people freaking, saying, How did they get this? What is this about? When you see that, you know you're on the right track."
Neotis contracts with a third party to create its stretch nonwovens in a 50,000-square-foot, metal-sided structure in an anonymous Richmond, Virginia, industrial park. The signless exterior makes the place easy to miss - but under Neotis orders, visitors are threatened with blindfolds until they're through the front door, and have to sign a pact promising to keep secret the name of the private company. DuPont wants to maintain its elastic edge on the nonwoven competition: Only Neotis fabrics already feature the two-way stretch (side to side and up and down) that shoppers have come to expect in conventionally sewn jeans and suits.
Inside the building, Neotis scientist Melissa Sherman and Ninabeth Sowell, the startup's director of sales and marketing, guide me past 5,000-foot rolls of nonwoven substrates - the synthetic foundations of nonwoven fabrics that await the incorporation of yarn or Lycra to become wearable. We enter a fluorescent-lit room containing wall-sized racks of thread. Two of the gigantic stands hold up to 800 cylinders of the stuff, and the contents of all the cylinders feed onto an enormous, 13-foot spool on the other side of the room. "Drop down to 799 threads and the machine stops," explains the plant's general manager, Jeff Siffert. There's also an elaborate tensioning and guide system, and cameras scan for problems 250 times a millisecond.
Sherman eyes the byzantine, roomwide span of threads, each of them containing Lycra fiber. "I want to put stretch in everything," she says over the din of machinery.
Enthusiasm, a clotheshorse sensibility, and a mind for molecules make Sherman perfect for her job. Before coming to DuPont, she earned a PhD in polymer chemistry at the University of Akron in Ohio. While most of her classmates were gravitating toward heavy-industry lab work, she was unabashedly drawn to the chemical makeup of "femininish" consumer goods: cosmetics, hair care products, and clothing. "There's polymer chemistry in high-heeled shoes," she tells me with a grin.
Her first DuPont job was to create molecule chains for fabric finishes. Blue-sky research not being her bag, Sherman moved to Neotis last summer, where she oversees the advancement of nonwoven fabric.
Siffert leads us into a room with a dozen green, story-and-a-half-high electric sewing machines called stitch-bonders, which are generating a predictable racket. Each $180,000 machine holds six of the big spools; via thousands of needles, the yarn is stitched into a Neotis nonwoven. With the addition of Lycra, a fabric emerges that can stretch to triple its length.
We retreat to Siffert's wood-paneled office. The stitch-bonding process is impressive, but I don't get the need for blindfolds.
"This is a secret?" I ask. "This is sewing."
Sherman motions to Sowell.
The sales director hands me a couple of swatches of fabric still in development. One is yellow, thick and soft as a blanket. It's covered in Lycra-based yarn that allows the fabric to wrap tightly around someone. The other is delicate-looking, pink and incredibly thin. The nylon substrate is almost sheer; an angora-like yarn obscures Lycra bands that are set 12 inches apart. The material has the gentle give of a sweater. The two samples are beautiful - and couldn't be more different.
"You have to know which yarn, the frequency of the stitch, the pattern of the stitch," Sherman explains. "You have to pick between different substrates and different thicknesses."
Sherman has spent as long as two months trying to perfect one fabric. Once she finds the right blend of stretch and materials, she faces quality-control issues. Occasional aesthetic slipups aren't a problem with the mattress-pad skirting that this facility usually pumps out. But miss a stitch in Neotis fabric and that glitch could land on someone's back. Material made from polyethylene - better known as milk-jug plastic - also poses a problem for the stitch-bonding machines: These substrates wear out needles up to 33 percent faster than any comparable material.
"We're taking nonwovens technology and cramming it into textiles applications," says Sherman. "It's forcing a square peg into a round hole."
The steep learning curve of nonwovens has already compromised the plans of Neotis' early clients. Just ask Nike. The athletic gear company ran into trouble when it tried to get different tints for the nonwoven uppers of its line of Andre Agassi-signature shoes. Nike wanted the minimalist footwear - which has simple foam soles, polyethylene uppers, weighs about 5.5 ounces per shoe, and costs only $40 per pair - to come in funky colors.
The trouble was, polyethylene doesn't dye. "But the material has such a cool aesthetic that it's worth getting the product and then working through the problems," says Sean McConnell, Nike's creative director of tennis footwear. "The first thing we had to do was get the shoes to market." With novelty prevailing over all else, Nike settled for tennies in Tyvek white, as it did with its current lineup of Neotis-based warm-up suits.
Of course, Sherman hopes to find a solution to the color problem and even has a lead: Neotis found a California business with an industrial-size ink-jet printer that's capable of coloring polyethylene substrates. It's the same technology used to print the vinyl that wraps buildings and city buses in advertisements. But so far such a printing process is slow, expensive, and not as durable as dyeing.
The answer could also come from within DuPont, where chemists are tweaking the polyethylene polymer, the fabric's building block, in hopes of making the fibers intrinsically dye-friendly. Unfortunately, the solution could be years off. Polymers are so complex that it recently took 16 DuPont PCs running full-time for three months to better grasp the connection between the inherent properties and molecular makeup of a chemical compound.
Until the technology catches up with Sherman's needs, the fabric technician will continue searching worldwide for answers to her nonwoven questions. There's a long list, including durability issues like shrinkage, tear strength, and washability. While the average pair of blue jeans gets tossed in the hamper a hundred times, Sherman can only endorse the startup's fabrics through 20 cycles. "I don't think our fabrics will degrade after more," says Sherman, "but who's had the time to do 50 launderings?"
Stone Age hunters created the first nonwoven textiles by pounding wet animal hair into a toasty felt. Centuries ago the Japanese coated paper - a very simple nonwoven - with lacquer to make raincoats. In the 1960s, wood pulp was mechanically pressed into nonwoven disposable diapers and baby wipes, and as an offbeat promotion one paper-products manufacturer sold a nonwoven "paper" dress. The garment launched a fad. There were paper bathing suits, travel underwear, and wedding gowns. The clothes were appropriately space-age - wear and toss. But they were also about as soft as gas station wipes, and quickly went the way of the hula hoop.
Around the time of the paper craze, new nonwoven materials and technologies emerged. Synthetic polymers could be melted or dissolved and then extruded in fiber form, spraying from spinnerets (nozzles with thousands of tiny holes) onto conveyor belts to create thin, strong sheets of material. One of these new, plastic-based nonwovens - Tyvek - would become the backbone for most Neotis fabrics.
The fiber used in Tyvek was serendipitously discovered in 1955. A DuPont researcher named Jim White noticed an unusual, stringy material leaking from a pipe used for transporting polyethylene polymers. While most extruded fibers were individual strands, the polyethylene fibers separated and came back together in a highly resilient web.
The strong and light polyethylene structure kicked off a 12-year quest to create a commercially viable extrusion process - and a decades-long struggle for DuPont to figure out its potential. The nonwoven was initially tried as book-cover and furniture-tag material. There was talk of using it for wallpaper and for wrapping bedsprings. By 1970, single-use Tyvek protective suits were for sale, and in 1975, Federal Express started making envelopes of Tyvek. Car covers and weatherproofing for buildings followed.
The lightweight nonwoven seemed like a natural foundation for clothing. But the consumer-apparel market was an awkward challenge for an industrial business division. For decades, the only Tyvek clothes were clammy jogging jackets stitched together by mom-and-pop garment shops.
Then, early last year, DuPont vice president Steve McCracken got a look at some experimental nonwoven samples developed in the company's labs. Although the fabrics were made from Tyvek, some of them stretched and others were amazingly soft - qualities never before associated with the product. McCracken, a fidgety, longtime DuPont executive who helped usher in the big business of Lycra-based sportswear, was blown away.
"I thought this could be something magical," he says. "Not only for the marketplace, but doing something progressive at DuPont."
The vice president pushed for an unprecedented link between separate DuPont business units, and a little more than a year ago, the company launched its first real startup: Neotis Studio. McCracken is less interested in the material's exceptional wearability than in its potential to be manufactured at speeds unheard of in the fabric industry. In the 60 seconds it takes the best industrial loom to weave less than a yard of conventional fabric, spinnerets create a sheet of nonwoven material hundreds of feet long.
"It's a technologically advanced route," says McCracken. "When we can make the basic twill pant material in a nonwoven version, we're talking about the highly efficient production of billions of meters of fabric."
Working within a $3 million annual budget, Neotis has rolled out a wide array of nonwoven-based textiles, which is currently trickling into apparel lines worldwide. Like its fledgling competition, Neotis bases its fabrics on existing technologies. It takes the nylon, polyester, and polyethylene nonwovens that DuPont has made for decades and modifies them to form more breathable and pliable foundations for Neotis textiles. After the Lycra or yarn is stitched in, Neotis claims the materials under its own label and names the fabrics - Kojima, Gotham, and Climate Control, among others.
The prices - a nonwoven shirt can run $140 - will come down as production streamlines, and ultimately the textiles should sell for less than their traditional competitors. The startup currently boasts 24 fabrics and a list of customers including Nike and Levi's, as well as Tommy Hilfiger. Within five years, Neotis is aiming for $100 million in revenue.
McCracken sees the business expanding into upholstery and bedspreads, and nonwoven purses and backpacks aren't out of the question. Neotis fabrics are already found inside rucksacks: Last spring, its tops were worn by mountaineers heading to Everest.
So far, Neotis' strategy for bringing its fabrics to the masses has been based on getting apparel's industry leaders past the nonwovens-as-Handi Wipes stereotype. To date, the startup is doing convincing work. In the wake of the hubbub at the French trade show, Neotis landed spring 2002 business from high-profile designers Girbaud and Brazil's Carlos Miele. DDC's nonwoven clothing, as well as Nike and Levi's products, gives Neotis international credibility and influences the second tier of me-too designers. "In the whole apparel business, at the peak of the pyramid is the creative," says McCracken. "Get them to respond and it builds momentum."
While the fashionistas play tug-of-war with Neotis fabrics (which cost up to $13 per yard - standard denim, by comparison, is $2.50 per yard), the startup works to lower prices by using the apparel industry's standard globalization tactics. Overseas factories can take on some production, although only DuPont plants in Richmond and Luxembourg are equipped to make Tyvek. Sherman discovered Taiwanese businesses that do stitch-work. And Neotis is teaching its clients' cut-and-sew shops the nuances of making nonwoven clothing. More stitching, for example, can make a nonwoven weaker, which runs counter to knit-and-woven-fabric logic.
Where there's a market, there's also competition, even in an embryonic industry like wearable nonwovens. Over the next year, the fabrics of two competitors - Polymer Group and Freudenberg Nonwovens - will be used by travel clothing company Ex Officio and Levi's.
Meanwhile, Neotis is developing more mainstream apparel. Nike is already contemplating other applications for Neotis' fully recyclable polyethylene. One Nike shoe designer says he sees a day when athletes buy six-packs of inexpensive Neotis-based basketball shoes: Play one game in a pair and then recycle them. As for the mountaineers high in the Himalayas, they're learning that they can live in Neotis' samples. "Breathes fine, isn't clammy, and doesn't smell," climber Eric Simonson told me in an email from Everest base camp. "Several members wear the clothing every day."
A few months ago, even better news came when DDC signed a one-year design deal with the Gap. Nothing's certain, but a nonwoven shirt could go on sale next to some baggy-fit jeans.
As DDC knows, the trickle-down effect rules in the world of fashion. One day's runway success can fuel a whole season's worth of trends. Someday soon, mega-clothing companies may look to Neotis to fill store racks.
DuPont's McCracken sure hopes so. He recently ran the numbers on the potential of nonwoven khakis: Once Sherman nails the formula and the fabric can be efficiently produced, nonwoven khakis will cost 25 percent less than wovens. "We don't specify whether clothes are knits or wovens now," says McCracken. "If nonwovens can do everything they can, their construction becomes transparent. When that day comes, nonwovens have entered the magic kingdom. It's push over the denim. Put this on the shelf."
