Snap-Button Shirt

In the late 1920s, DuPont's chemical director sent his executive committee a radical memo: stop investing in practical improvements to existing products and fund pure science instead. The result, a decade later, was nylon — the first synthetic fiber ever made, and one of the most consequential material discoveries of the twentieth century.

Wallace H. Carothers, a young organic chemistry lecturer lured away from Harvard, joined DuPont's new 'Purity Hall' research laboratory in 1928. He proposed to center his work on polymerization — the chemical process by which small molecules link into long-chain structures. On February 28, 1935, his team produced polyhexamethylene adipamide — nylon 66 — a polymer that could be drawn into strong, elastic threads unlike anything that had existed before. The name 'nylon' was not an acronym. It was simply a coined word, invented by DuPont's marketing team, for a synthetic and versatile material.

Nylon's public debut came at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, where DuPont unveiled nylon stockings as a revolution in women's fashion. On May 15, 1940 — 'N-Day' — nylon stockings went on sale nationwide. In the first year, 64 million pairs were sold. When demand outpaced supply, 'nylon riots' erupted at department stores across the country. Nothing like it had happened for a consumer product before.

Then came WWII, and nylon vanished from the shops overnight. DuPont's entire nylon output was redirected to the war effort: parachutes replacing silk, tent ropes, mosquito nets, tire cords. The Allied armed forces were quite literally held together by a polymer from a Delaware laboratory. When the war ended, nylon returned to civilian life carrying an unprecedented reputation — it had helped win a world war.

The story also has its tragedy. Wallace Carothers — the man who made it possible — never saw N-Day. Brilliant and profoundly depressive, he died by suicide in April 1937, two years before the product bearing his intellectual legacy reached the public. DuPont's nylon patent application had been filed just months before.

Today, 7 million tonnes of nylon are produced annually. It is in toothbrush bristles, guitar strings, surgical sutures, parachutes, car engine components, fishing lines, hosiery, activewear, technical outerwear, swimwear, and cargo pants. Its sustainability challenge — petroleum-derived and shedding microplastics in every wash — has triggered an innovation race producing some of the most genuinely interesting material science in fashion today.