I'm not into fashion; I just want natural fabrics in classic looks. Suppose you wanted to find 100% cotton casual pants, chinos, khakis, etc in the Western world. Could you do it?
Unfortunately, you may find this task ranging from unreasonably difficult to next-to-impossible. You see, clothing manufacturers have decided to add 2-3% elastane to nearly all skus of men's cotton pants, en masse, in a coordinated way.
Choose any brand off the top of your head and attempt to find a 100% cotton pant without any elastane. Look for the materials listing.If you do manage to find one, there's a 90% chance it will be on sale or clearence.
Apparently, this transition has been in works for some time. Yes, even for jeans.
One could argue that this is simply:
- The usual cartel-imposed fashion cycle as profit-making tool. The recent scourage of the dress shirt "spread collar" comes to mind.
- The "planned obsolecence" model applied to pants as elastane tends to degrade quickly, ruining the drape and cut of the pants
- A billion-dollar deal cut with the synthetics industry by fashion cartels
However, is that what we're seeing in this case? The infiltration of 2% elastane into the men's casual pants category is almost TOTAL. It's bizarre. It's not that these brands are carrying blended fabric "flex" pants alongside the cotton fabrics or even just giving them priority. The cotton pants are GONE. You can't buy them.
To speculate, this operation doesn't have the appearence to me of being just about profits this time. Consider the woven elastane as the vehicle for a beacon, repeater, or payload.
If elastane is a monopolized commodity, then a whole variety of nanotech can be silently blended into the raw product while guarenteeing that it receives whole-market penetration. Thousands of manufactures worldwide then buy elastane thread from this monopoly and weave the product into their clothes under the auspice of "added comfort", distrubuting nanotech into billions of articles of clothing. A trojan horse having direct contact with the bodies of hundreds of millions of men.
Think...
- Long-term contact with skin
- Designed to "ping",
- Designed to degrade, release, shed
Think...
- Mass bio-surveilance, track and trace
- Unique RFIDs embedded in fabric, wearer and location metadata
- IoT and "wearables"
- Delivery of synth-bio fibers
IDK, but cheap Wrangler Jeans made in Mexico I usually bought on Ebay from US ( now I have to use other channels :) ) is 100% cotton without any elastane or anything else. Models I bought was from well-known 935, 13MWZ, to the cheapest Five Star (don't know their model). Since I weared a lot of them, using as a working clothes, after their lifetinme I used their fabric for different purposes, including as a wick for vintage kerosene lamps as a cloth with different solvents and for many other purposes, so I'm pretty shure they have no any polymer fibers in them at all.
So you could buy pants without polymer fiber, you just have to apply some effort to do that.
As for you theory, regardless of elastane harm to human body, manufacturers add it to make pants "fit for all" as much as possible to rise sells and so profits, instead of prperly designing patterns as in the past. I think any potential harm is more a side-effect than intentional.
If you want to harm people through clothes, it is easier and more effective to do it through dyes, than through adding polymer fibers.
Woooosh