What Can a Person Wear?

The thing about the complaint that natural fibers are ill-fitting is a bit odd. It's true that less stretchy clothing is more forgiving, but it's also true that the ill-fitting aspect is because of the cut, not the fiber. The problem can be easily and (relatively) cheaply fixed by having the garment altered to fit you.

| My experience with natural fabric clothing is that it either hangs like a giant pillowcase over my body or it bunches and binds in the ugliest way

This is why the world needs tailors and seamstresses. Someone skilled with a needle can take those clothes in or let them out where they need to be and make them look fantastic.

For a cost, of course. But as the article points out, microplastics are also a cost.

There are fashions which are current and involve a measure of adjustability. It isn't necessary to wear only robes and wrapped cloth to achieve this although I understand the occasional desire to throw in (on?) the towel and give up fitted primarily western style clothing altogether. However the idea that clothing today is "just" a fixed size is merely one way of looking at it which you can choose to do or not.

Formal/business attire: tailoring is nice but a military tuck lets a dress shirt conform to the belly you have, not the one (or several) it was patterned on.

Casual, work and streetwear: additional snaps, buttons, and ties are often used to allow the wearer to fit to their body and desired motion. Some brands have a show clear intention, such as having a small pleat or even slit in the pant waist with elastic so that it can be worn high or low at a range of sizes. More commonly, elastic pulls on jackets or athletic pants. Others have give less direction but more options by leaving button holes or grommets so the wearer can create their own shape and hold it.

On the consumer end it is difficult to tell when a garment is designed with any of this in mind or if it's just mindless copying or following trends. Having some minuscule knowledge into the design side I can say that it's a mix of both. Brands which care about it have designers who care and try to research these things to use them strategically; they tend to signal the versatility by readily showing models wearing them in different, sometimes unintended ways. Streetwear is ripe with this because brands often produce less meaning less sizes available and they (and their customers) value the suggested creativity. If you can only make S, M, L or M, L, XL but want 5ft women and 6.5ft men to enjoy them that is a challenge which some designers live for.

There exist several filters intended to be fitted to the washing machine to trap the microfiber shedding. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/reduce-laundry-micro... this had several products to address the situation - I don't think solutions like this should be categorized as "lame", that's incredibly lazy and negative, and I think encourages people to have the "fuck it, let's dance in the flames of the world burning" attitude. Washing less often and at lower temps will also decrease the shedding. I think we need to take a 'harm reduction' approach, filter the micro plastics at sources, reserve synthetic clothes for when they are required, address the fast fashion waste problem. It's not just micro plastics, but when clothes are only worn for a season, there's a ton of waste and environmental impact.

The author is correct on use cases, for a lot of applications, synthetic fibers are the only viable answer. As a drysuit diver with a wool allergy, I cannot avoid synthetic fibers in my undergarments (warm clothes you wear under the drysuit designed to still insulate you long enough to safely exit your dive even if the drysuit fails and is flooded). I have thought about the irony of this as I do cleanup dives to remove larger plastic pieces from the ocean.

It is not? I prefer to avoid plastic in general, so most clothes I buy are 100% cotton. If I wanted to, I could also go with organic cotton instead, it’s almost always an option for online clothing stores (less so for the metal band shirts which I wear 99% of the time).