Guide · Clothing
Most of what's sold as clothing in America is plastic. Here's which fabrics are actually worth buying and what each one is good for — plus the words on a tag that tell you it's been sprayed with something.
If you remember nothing else, remember these three. Almost every good answer below comes out of them.
That last one does the most work and nobody talks about it. The finish is where the chemicals are. A plain cotton shirt and a wrinkle-free cotton shirt are not the same product.
Tap what you're shopping for. Verdicts are about the fibre itself — a good fibre with a bad finish on it is still a bad buy.
This is the useful part. Screenshot it and check it before you buy — these phrases are describing a chemical treatment, not a feature of the cloth.
The four words that mean PFAS: water-repellent, waterproof, stain-resistant, easy-care. California and New York both banned PFAS in clothing starting 1 January 2025 — which sounds great until you read the rest of it. California can't actually start enforcing until 2030. The lab methods get published in 2029, companies register in mid-2029, and penalties begin in July 2030. So the ban is real and the teeth are five years out. Until then it's on you to read the tag.
Where the plastic in your clothes actually ends up.
Every time you wash something synthetic, it sheds. Not a little — this has been counted. One 6 kg load, measured at Plymouth:
Fleece and jersey are the worst of the lot — mechanically-treated polyester sheds roughly six times what woven nylon does. Wastewater plants catch some of it and 40% or more goes straight through. Synthetic textiles are now the single biggest source of microplastics in the ocean, around 35% of the total.
What actually helps, in order: wash it less often and spot-clean instead · wash cold on a shorter cycle · run full loads, because less friction means less shedding · skip the dryer where you can · use a filter bag or an in-line machine filter if you own a lot of fleece. France already requires filters on new washing machines. We don't.
Three logos get used interchangeably in marketing. They check completely different things, and none of them checks everything.
| Label | What it actually checks | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| OEKO-TEX Standard 100 | Tests the finished item for harmful substances — every part, down to the buttons and thread. | Says nothing about what the fibre is, where it came from, or how it was made. |
| GOTS | The strictest one. Traces certified organic fibre through the whole chain, with environmental and labour rules attached. | Only applies to organic natural fibres. You won't find it on a jacket. |
| bluesign | Approves the chemicals and the factory process before anything gets made. | It's a manufacturer system, not a promise about the item in your hand. Doesn't cover fibre origin or recycled content. |
If you only want one to look for: OEKO-TEX Standard 100 is the most useful, because it's the one that tests the actual thing you're buying for the actual chemicals. It just doesn't tell you whether that thing is plastic.
I'm going to be careful here, because this is where a lot of accounts stop being honest.
They are finding this stuff in us. A 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at 257 people who'd had plaque surgically removed from a neck artery. Polyethylene showed up in 58% of those plaque samples. Over the next three years, the patients who had plastic in their plaque were 4.5 times more likely to have a heart attack, a stroke, or die.
Other work has found microplastic in brain tissue at levels far above liver or kidney, and the amount appears to have climbed roughly 50% between 2016 and 2024.
Here's the part I won't skip. Those studies found an association. They did not show that the plastic caused the strokes — plaque is already damaged tissue, and sick people differ from healthy people in a hundred ways. And the plastic in a human artery didn't necessarily come from clothing; it could be packaging, bottles, tyres, or household dust.
So I'm not going to tell you your leggings are giving you a heart attack. What I'll tell you is this: they're finding plastic in arteries and brain tissue, the amount is going up, and no one can yet tell you what it does in there. That isn't reassuring. That's an experiment nobody agreed to.
In February 2026 the State of Texas sued Shein. The filing describes clothing "meant for newborns, expectant mothers, and school children" as "silent carriers of poison."
Greenpeace had bought 56 Shein items across eight countries — 17 of them children's — and sent them to an accredited German lab. 18 of the 56 broke EU chemical limits. Seven water-repellent jackets came back with PFAS at up to 3,300 times the limit. Fourteen items were over on phthalates, six of them by 100× or more. A children's costume had formaldehyde at 3.5× the limit. A pair of sandals had lead.
Greenpeace had already tested Shein in 2022. Shein pulled everything that failed — and then, in Greenpeace's words, those items were "replaced with near-identical items containing the same hazardous chemicals — possibly even from the same supplier."
But this isn't really a Shein story. 82% of what they sell is polyester, which is to say oil. That's the same material filling every fast-fashion rack in the country. Shein just got caught with the receipts.