My local swimming spot, a bathing pond on London’s Hampstead Heath, is a vision of bucolic beauty. With ducks dabbling and trees dipping their branches in the water, it resembles one of the English idylls painted by John Constable. However, as I did a leisurely lap recently, it started to trouble me that my mainly nylon swimming costume could be shedding microplastics straight into the water.
According to several textile experts I consulted, there is the potential for swimsuits to shed fibres during swimming due to the agitation involved — though less significant than washing synthetic clothes in a machine using detergent. However, as swimsuits are almost universally made from plastic-based materials, I still wondered if a more natural alternative could be found.
Good luck with that! The options, it transpires, are limited — especially as I didn’t particularly want to resemble a saucy 1950s seaside postcard in a vintage cotton garment or a blushing Edwardian bather in sailor-themed woollen knickerbockers.
Still, swimwear brands are increasingly flexing their eco credentials, be it in the materials used or the manufacturing process. Hip swimwear label Hunza G’s distinctive crinkled fabric is knitted and dyed in a mill in the English Midlands, then cut and made in central London to reduce its carbon footprint. And Econyl, a regenerated nylon, derived from waste such as old carpets and fishing nets, is increasingly popular among high street brands and luxury labels alike.
Swimwear made from regenerated materials generally uses fewer resources than virgin nylon, and several brands such as Stay Wild have schemes through which customers can recycle their old swimwear.
However, a handful of brands are also addressing the growing recognition that we need to shake off our reliance on synthetics. Natalija Dedic Stojanovic, creative director of Paraiso Miami Beach, the world’s biggest marketing event for the swimwear and resort-wear industry, says: “An increasing number of brands are adopting recycled alternatives, but the suits are not biodegradable and they shed microfibres when they are washed. There is still a lot of work to be done.”
At the American swimwear and basics label Vitamin A, founder and designer Amahlia Stevens says that “even regenerated nylon is still a petroleum product and the whole goal of our generation is to move away from petroleum products in every industry.”
Of course it wasn’t always like this. Historical swimwear was made of natural fibres but was hardly streamlined. In the 18th century, women’s bathing gowns were cotton but sometimes also had lead weights sewn into the hem to ensure the skirt did not float up. In the 19th century, voluminous woollen bathing dresses would become treacherously heavy. Swimwear became more user-friendly in the early 20th century as bathing suits, although still made of wool, and occasionally silk, became smaller and more fitted thanks to simpler styles such as those by Jantzen. However, it was in the mid-20th century that nylon really took off, with Speedo launching its first nylon swimsuit in 1957. It was a stretchy, streamlined, fast-drying revolution.
And having tasted the joys of synthetics, it’s hard to give them up. At Vitamin A, Stevens says it’s a challenge to find materials that aren’t derived from fossil fuels, but look sleek, dry quickly and retain their shape. As well as recycled nylon, Vitamin A’s sporty designs use a plant-based polyamide fabric called BioSculpt sourced from castor beans, which Stevens says is “fast-drying, comfy and soft. It sculpts and holds you.”
Yet while BioSculpt is a plant-based fabric, it has been blended with Lycra to allow it to stretch. Akhil Sivanandan at sustainability consultancy Greenstory (which works with Vitamin A) emails to point out that “any fibre with plastic petroleum fibre added, like Lycra, will not be compostable. Blending a plant-based fibre with plastic affects biodegradability as plastics take 20-200 years to do so. That’s why the industry is moving towards biodegradable elastics.”
How biodegradable a material will be is hard to predict accurately as it is affected by so many variables. Another material, Amni Soul, is used by size-inclusive American swimwear label Bold Swim, and is an enhanced polyamide that biodegrades, according to its manufacturers, in landfill conditions in five years.
Swimwear designer Natasha Tonic is championing a mix of hemp, organic cotton and 4 per cent Lycra for her tie-dye and cutaway designs, and uses dyes with a lower environmental impact. I tried a black swimsuit that had a pleasing matt jersey feel, and while it didn’t have a Spandex-like slickness, once in the water I couldn’t tell the difference. And I didn’t soak up water like a sponge as I feared.
Tonic set up her online business direct-to-consumer so she could “sell to people who really believe in it”. After an inquiry from a woman on Instagram “who was going to be exploring a deep chamber of the ocean, and had been told she could only wear natural fibres”, the designer was inspired to look into creating a swimsuit with no synthetic components.
At Outerknown, pro-surfer Kelly Slater’s six-year-old label, sustainability and sourcing director Megan Stoneburner says the brand recently piloted Coreva, “an innovative technology that replaces synthetic, petroleum-based stretch with a natural biodegradable solution without compromising on aesthetics or quality”. In 2019 Outerknown released a range of sleek-looking swimming trunks made from merino wool. But although they were very popular, Stoneburner says, the brand has no “current plans to reissue them. We would like to upgrade the Woolaroo in the future, but are working to identify ways to use regenerative or recycled wool.”
So how about hand-dyed cotton swimwear knitted to order? New York designer Kaylyn Gardner’s Orient swimsuit is a beautiful, haute-hippie chic halter-neck design in organic cotton, hand-dyed using avocados to achieve a subtle shell pink. Perfect for a high-end resort in Bora-Bora (provided you swim there, rather than take a carbon-emitting flight). Gardner gets about two orders a week from customers who want natural fibres and to avoid microplastics. She tries “to create designs that are naturally supportive when wet” and adds elastic only “upon request depending on the size to give more support.”
Several labels offer crocheted cotton bikinis, but only a few — Valentino’s desert island-style, for example — don’t have a synthetic lining. They also feel more suited to poolside posing while completely static than worn with swimming goggles for actual exercise.
A few hemp bikinis aren’t going to save the planet, but they highlight the synthetics rut in which much of the apparel industry is stuck. And re-evaluating our often very loaded relationship with swimwear could be worthwhile, especially as Love Island and Netflix resort-based dating show Too Hot to Handle are set to showcase skimpy new styles.
Peggy Blum, author of Circular Fashion: Making the Fashion Industry Sustainable, points out that it is not only part of the culture of disposable fashion, it has also evolved into “a sexy, emotional piece” bound up with how we view our bodies. As she puts it, “What’s selling swimwear today is not sustainability.” But perhaps it should be.
Carola Long is the FT’s deputy fashion editor
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