in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread.
(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)
we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love ,and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over.
we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow.
so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back.
then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt.
it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no.
then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where”s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone
and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline
this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much
i must not get takeout. takeout is the wallet-killer. takeout is the little-death that brings total obliteration. i will face the kitchen, fridge, and pantry. i will make choices about what to cook and then execute them. when hunger is gone there will be nothing. only i will remain.
Yeah I looked on your website it’s made by the lyocell process, which means-
-wait for it-
It’s fucking rayon!!
Listen. There is a list of actual plant fibers that are directly made into fabric: cotton, linen, ramie, some hemp. I’m sure I’m missing a couple.
But if you’re wondering “huh how did they turn that plant material into fabric,” 99% of the time? It’s RAYON.
All rayon is made by putting plant material in chemical soup, dissolving out everything but the cellulose, and turning the cellulose into filaments/fibers.
The source of the cellulose has zero effect on the eventual fabric.
Rayon made from bamboo or eucalyptus or seaweed is not any better than rayon from any other sources.
Don’t let companies mislead you!
Hold on I need to DuckDuckGo something
Damn this was supposed to be a joke but turns out it’s hard to get scientifically rigorous comparisons of environmental impact across textile products from a casual search. “It’s all fucking rayon” appears mostly true but also I’m finding plenty of claims that it’s more sustainable than cotton anyway.
But that’s not what this post was actually about anyway so like
it’s all fucking rayon confirmed I guess 👍
So it’s worth separating out two things here:
the qualities of rayon as a fabric, outside of any other consideration
the environmental impacts
This post is mostly about the first thing. A lot of companies are giving rayon many many different names as a way of disguising that It’s Just Rayon, and claiming the fabric has special qualities.
But cellulose is cellulose. The process of extruding it into filaments and making those filaments into fibers/yarn/fabric is what gives it different qualities: some rayon is silky, some is fuzzy, etc.
It’s all great at absorbing sweat, and it all takes longer to dry, and it insulates okay until it gets damp at which point it’s worse than wearing nothing, which is why it’s often blended into other things. The really nice tops I have from Uniqlo’s Heattech line are a blend of a couple of synthetics and rayon. They’re warm for being so thin and stretchy, but don’t make me sweaty-feeling at all. (In a conversation among people with ADHD I found out I’m not the only one who wears them nearly daily for ¾ths of the year lol.)
The irony of how often it’s compared to polyester in the notes of this post is that polyester can also be made into a billion different textures. I have polyester that feels like wearing a plastic tarp, but I also own polyester that’s light and breezy and totally comfy in boiling heat. I also have some very soft polyester fleece, as many people do. It’s all a matter of how the filaments are extruded and how they’re made into fabric.
But to get into the environmental stuff:
People get really into which fabrics are more “sustainable.”
And rayon currently is made, 99% of the time, via one of two processes: viscose and lyocell (Tencel is a brand name for the lyocell process). Viscose is an older method and far more common, to the point that if a fabric doesn’t specify that it’s lyocell (or cuproammonium) you can probably assume it’s viscose. Viscose is, generally speaking, far more polluting and hazardous to the humans working in the factory as well. Lyocell uses what’s called a “closed-loop” method, so it puts out way fewer pollutants. It’s also more expensive, generally speaking. There is such a thing as “ecoviscose” but I haven’t looked into it.
(Modal just means rayon made from beech trees and afaict doesn’t differentiate which process. Cupro is made using a less-common process called “cuproammonium,” and I’m not sure how polluting it is, but apparently in China it’s sometimes called “ammonia silk” which is wild.)
Rayon does have two definite advantages, despite everything I said up there:
you can make it out of any cellulose source, and that includes things that would otherwise be considered garbage/waste
it biodegrades pretty fast. Like, faster than cotton.
BUT THAT ALL SAID: every fabric requires something shitty, quite frankly. Cotton takes a TON of water and usually pesticides. Silk requires a lot of farming of mulberry and then electricity to warm the places where the silkworms live and also you have to cook the silkworms alive so they don’t cut the fibers. Linen requires its own chemical soup to be turned into usable fibers unless you’re making it from flax the old fashioned way which requires a lot of time and a shit-ton of effort. (Like seriously there’s rippling, retting, breaking, scutching, and hackling. And THEN you can spin it into thread.) Wool requires a lot of land etc for sheep, but also any wool item you own that’s machine washable has had the barbs melted off the fibers with chemicals, and in many cases is also coated with a resin!
And that’s not getting into dying. But if you’ve ever dyed fabric at home you know that it usually requires careful handling and in many cases goggles. Those chemicals are often toxic as fuck.
If you’re trying to be sustainable in your clothing choices, the fact is that the absolute best thing you can do is:
BUY LESS CLOTHES. Period. End of story.
Buy secondhand when you can.
Make those clothes last: use cold water washes and don’t put them in the dryer and don’t use fabric softener. Repair them when you can, and use them for rags when they wear out.
“What fiber is it made of” just matters way fucking less than buying fewer items of clothing and using them until they wear out.
But most people don’t want to do those things. They want to know which brand of clothes is “sustainable.”
The sustainable thing is to buy and throw away less clothes. That’s it.
If a person insists on focusing on “which brand of clothes is more sustainable”, the answer is whatever brand makes sturdy clothes that last a long time.
Which is a roundabout way of reaching “buy less clothes”, but when people refuse to listen that’s sometimes what you have to do.
I think thats important though because its not just a matter of buying fast fashion and wear it till theres nothing left but scraps cause that often doesnt take too long If you can, buy good sturdy stuff that you like and wear it as long as you can.
Its not bad to be curious. I do wish they were more honest about fabric so there isnt so many different names to remember if its a fibre or a weave or a process.
And I think it also matters to some degree if youre buying things that’ll biodegrade in the next ten thousands years or not. But idk if individuals can have enough impact for us to stop producing so much cloth that goes sometimes literally straight to landfill.
That’s the thing with industry, including the fashion industry, it’s so big and the way it’s designed it basically doesn’t matter what any individual (or even what we consider a large group of individuals) does as far as the industry is concerned.
But that doesn’t mean we should all give up! If nothing else, making a point of changing habits to be more eco friendly in your life helps you to notice where society is not eco friendly, which can keep motivation going to press for change at higher levels. Staying aware is important.
When it comes to clothes honestly, longer lasting stuff is going to be made of higher quality material which is going to feel nicer when you wear it, drape and look nicer, and save you money in the long run (even more true if you are able to find sturdy stuff second hand). And if you’re like me and don’t like clothes shopping and/or have trouble finding time to do it, longer lasting clothes helps avoid that too.
Still on my locked tomb and feudalism bullshit, so here’s a discussion of John, and how I think he systematically uses the decentralized nature of the Nine Houses to avoid the realities of being God.
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