Six decades later, the attraction isn’t much different. “There’s something very seductive about materials that almost don’t behave like fabric,” says Saudi-born, London-based designer Ziyad Buainain. “Transparency, gloss, reflection and that almost liquid-like quality interact with the body and light in a completely different way.” Fashion, he points out, has always been drawn to contrast: “Something highly synthetic next to something raw or beautifully aged can create a tension that feels very modern.”
There is, however, an elephant in the room. This enthusiasm arrives at a time when fashion has spent years grappling with its dependence on synthetic materials and the waste they leave behind. It makes the sight of all that gleaming PVC, TPU and latex slightly more complicated. Can fashion celebrate the aesthetic while simultaneously trying to use less of it? For Dubai-based luxury, sustainability and longevity strategist Michela Simone, the more useful question is the one that arises before a garment is even made. “The first point is whether we need to use virgin plastic at all,” she says. “Reducing unnecessary unprocessed material has to come before finding better ways to manage it afterwards.” Recycling might appear to offer an obvious solution, but she cautions against treating it as a neat answer to a much larger problem. “We cannot recycle our way out of a production problem. It has a role to play, but reduction has a bigger one.”
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None of this means plastic – or its synthetic cousins – are disappearing from our wardrobes anytime soon. Nor, perhaps, should the conversation end there. This season, the catwalk was full of genuinely fun clothes and accessories that made a persuasive case for embracing the trend. At Chloé, a long, high-neck coat in shiny recycled nylon gave utilitarian outerwear a slick new finish, while the house’s jelly sandals have turned the childhood favourite into something more grown-up. Dubai-based journalist and author Sujata Assomull knows the temptation first-hand. “I recently bought the Chloé Jelly shoes and it took real deliberation,” she says. But after encountering flooding and heavy rain while travelling between Milan, New York, Colombo and India, their practicality became difficult to ignore. “They’ve turned out to be genuinely practical, and I intend to wear them for years, which is its own case for buying one good pair rather than a season’s worth of disposable ones.”
