It can. Fossil-fuel chemistry is not only used in fashion, but as we’ve seen, it owes its existence to fashion. Chemistry is fashion. Fashion is chemistry. But their shared heritage has been locked away like a shameful family secret.

Jaclyn realized there could be hundreds or even thousands more triggers out there that she didn’t know about. And unlike food, beauty products, or cleaning products, clothing doesn’t come with an ingredient list. Even with her insider’s knowledge of the industry and how clothes are made, Jaclyn felt as if there was nothing she could do to avoid

Fairweather revealed to me how this all works. As she explains it, we all have two types of immune responses: innate and adaptive. The innate response recognizes and fights infectious agents and toxins. The adaptive response builds a memory of what those infections and toxins look like and attacks them if they show up again. For example, for

fend for themselves against arsenic fashion’s ravages, as if it were a disease or God’s will, and not a man-made substance filling the coffers of the business elite.

Try to avoid anything that starts with poly—such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyester, polyamide, or polyurethane (PU)—plus nylon, acrylic, glues, plasticky prints and coatings, glitter, and sequins if you can. These materials can either off-gas or shed toxic substances themselves, or very likely require sensitizing and toxic chemicals during the

No reputable sources seemed to have spotted this story, of what can be put on the cotton—and, for that matter, polyester, nylon, wool, and viscose—many steps after it has been harvested and woven.

Swan put the blame squarely on “the ubiquity of insidiously harmful chemicals in the modern world” and especially “chemicals that interfere with our body’s natural hormones.” These are endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And they include a lot of fashion’s favorite finishes and ingredients: lead, mercury, arsenic, phthalates, APEOs, PFAS, and bisphenol

At the base of this controversy is the battle over the risk versus hazard approach to chemical safety. Hazard is the inherent danger of a chemical. Risk is the combination of how dangerous a chemical is and how high your potential exposure is. For example, we’ve learned that pure mercury is incredibly toxic. Ingesting it can kill you, if not

“Young children crawl around on the floor a lot, they put their hands in their mouths, and they ingest dust at up to twenty times the amount that an adult would ingest. Children still have developing organs and developing immune systems,” Overdahl told me. Stapleton was infuriated by the results. “We found these in baby pajamas. There could be a