The Fabric of Our Lives

it's complicated

All through the 90’s anyone who watched TV saw a lot of ads for cotton with the catch phrase “the fabric of our lives”. You can see one of those ads here, and how it attempts to really pull at the heart strings. It’s not entirely wrong, textiles are personal and intimate as well as incredibly linked to community. The push for cotton through marketing campaigns like these were actually paid for by farmers. Cotton was once the most used fiber globally but when synthetic and semi-synthetic fibers (think polyester, rayon, viscose, nylon, spandex, lyocell) came along and were cheaper they began to take over. Cotton gets a bad rep these days with wide spread belief that lots of water and pesticides are used to produce is it. The truth is far more complicated. Yes that is the case sometimes, and probably far too much so, but also cotton can be grown in a way that can be beneficial to the climate.