The Afterlife of a Swimsuit

The swimsuit is the one garment we buy with the express intention of submerging it in water, and water is precisely what it harms. Made, for most of its modern history, from petroleum, it has slipped past scrutiny for years. It is small, seasonal and worn somewhere we associate with pleasure rather than consequence. What has shifted recently is not that anyone has solved this. It is that the swimsuit has become the place where fashion is forced to think about what its products are made of, and what happens to them afterwards.

India is a useful place to watch this happen, partly because the stakes look so modest. The swimwear market here is worth around twenty-six million dollars and growing at fifteen to twenty per cent a year, both tiny and accelerating, a category still deciding what it wants to be. Into that gap have come a handful of young labels — Esha Lal Swimwear, Guapa, Salt Skin, Studio Verandah and others — building their identities around material before silhouette. Reby Jindal, who runs Guapa out of Delhi, calls the change "a shift toward a more durable, economically sensible, and environmentally-friendly approach." The revolution, if there is one, is happening at the level of the fibre.

Conventional swimwear is built from nylon, polyester and elastane, synthetics that stretch and dry quickly and last, which is the problem, because they last in the ocean too. The first wave of alternatives addresses this by recycling rather than replacing. Econyl, the most quoted name in the category, is a regenerated nylon made from waste, discarded fishing nets and fabric scraps and industrial plastic pulled out of landfill and sea, broken down to its molecular state and rebuilt as new fibre. Repreve does something similar with plastic bottles.

image Credits : https://www.solvay.com/en/brands/amni/amni-soul-eco

Synthetic clothing accounts for roughly a third of the microplastics in the ocean, and a swimsuit made from Econyl, like one made from ordinary nylon, sheds microplastic fibres every time it is washed, tiny fragments that pass through wastewater systems and into the rivers and the sea and, eventually, the fish and us. Recycled nylon is better than virgin nylon. It uses no new fossil fuel, generates far less carbon, and keeps waste in circulation. What it does not do is stop being plastic. The recycled swimsuit is a real improvement and an incomplete one, and a category that markets itself on ocean rescue ought to be able to hold both ideas at once.

The newer materials are more interesting because they reach past the front end of the problem toward the back. Tencel, spun from sustainably sourced wood pulp, and organic cotton and hemp sidestep the petroleum question entirely, though they handle saltwater and chlorine with less enthusiasm than synthetics, which is why they tend to appear in resortwear rather than performance pieces. The genuinely novel entry is Amni Soul Eco, a biodegradable polyamide marketed as the first of its kind, now arriving in Indian collections. Its premise is the one the recycled fibres skip. It is engineered to hold up throughout its wearable life and then, once discarded, decompose within years rather than the decades or centuries that ordinary nylon demands. Its newer formulation claims to break down the microplastics shed in the wash far faster too. 

None of this is frictionless. Sustainable materials cost more, and customers willing to pay the premium are rare. Sourcing remains awkward and scaling harder. And there is the perennial risk that sustainability becomes a register, a set of words a brand wears like a print, rather than a practice anyone could audit. The labels worth watching are the ones that are specific: naming the fibre, the percentage, and the process.

What has changed is the question. We are starting to ask not only what a swimsuit is made of but where it goes once the summer ends.

Source: AO India, October 2023 Issue