The New Sea Food

The future of fashion is inside us. We will—we are—wearing nanofibers internally, purchased not from a rack, but at the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s, the restaurant. Our identities, which we have adorned with plant and animal fibers for more than three hundred thousand years, will no longer only drape over us, they will become us—worn inside. Meet Fashion Eater.¹

Fashion is a watery business. Textile manufacturing has always used copious amounts of water to prepare plant and protein fibers for use as textiles. But we’ve entered a new age where the cyclical nature of our planet’s ecosystem means that after decades of serving as a repository of our waste, it has incorporated our textile inputs and is feeding them back to us, over and over again, at the nano level.

The global textile industry is a $1.7 trillion behemoth responsible for clothing billions of people. Yet its meteoric growth has come with significant ecological costs. Central among these is the issue of synthetic microfibers—tiny fragments of polyester, nylon, and acrylic that escape into waterways during laundering and industrial processes. These fibers are accumulating in the world’s oceans at an alarming rate, infiltrating marine ecosystems and entering the food chain. The fish and mollusks consuming these fibers have become unwitting participants in a complex ecological crisis, one that underscores the need for an urgent reevaluation of textile production, consumption, and waste management.

The future of textiles is so deep at sea that I feel the need to take a futurist twist on biologist Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis, which is an evolutionary mechanism of hereditary symbiosis. We, and our kin in the sea, are evolving in a plastic world we never anticipated. We are becoming plastic. Synthetic polymers and the chemicals of textile dyes are insistently, indestructibly on the rack and on the plate.

Predicting the future in this dystopian moment, I offer an idea. Perhaps there is a future of textiles based on new marine species arising from Margulis’s concept of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance—that organisms can undergo heritable, nongenetic changes in response to ecological conditions. I’m looking for future textile trends that will be expressed not by influencers but by fish and by those of us that eat fish—fashion and textile experiences that are completely internal.

For an example, let’s look to Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), a prime example of a species that is ecologically significant, widely consumed by humans, and affected by marine textile waste. Atlantic salmon are anadromous, meaning they migrate from saltwater to freshwater to spawn. The timing of their migration and spawning is influenced by environmental factors such as water temperature, salinity, and photoperiod.

Photoperiod, or daylight exposure, is a critical factor influencing salmon migration and breeding cycles, promoting the growth and hormonal changes linked to smoltification (the transformation enabling migration to seawater). Marine textile waste affects photoperiods by altering water clarity. Specifically, textile waste increases water turbidity by reducing the intensity and amount of sunlight penetration into the aquatic water column. It can also contribute to nutrient runoff which promotes algal blooms, which also reduces water clarity and disrupts natural light cycles. Dyes, flame retardants and other chemicals in discarded textiles, when released into the marine environments, can also absorb or reflect specific wavelengths of light, altering the spectral composition that reaches aquatic habitats and species like salmon. These altered light conditions disrupt the timing of behaviors in species like Atlantic salmon that are reliant on photoperiod cues for spawning, migration, and daily feeding cycles ultimately affecting reproduction, growth, and survival rates.²

Margulis’s perspective on evolution as a dynamic interplay of organisms and their environments aligns with this: the fish’s interaction with its environment doesn’t just influence its immediate survival but also shapes future generations’ developmental patterns. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance suggests that heritable changes in organisms can occur without alterations to the dna sequence, influenced instead by environmental and symbiotic interactions over generations. While Margulis herself often focused on symbiosis and symbiogenesis rather than epigenetics in the modern sense, environmental pressures (like the textile-saturated aquatic habitat of Atlantic salmon) play a role in shaping phenotypes. Over time, such traits can become stabilized in populations, illustrating a blend of genetic, environmental, and epigenetic influences. With this in mind, how is the future of textiles being told by salmon?

In her 1998 book, Symbiotic Planet, Margulis asserted that life evolves primarily through cooperation, interdependence, and fusion of organisms, not just through survival of the fittest. I’m deliberately using her bold departure from Darwinism as a point of entry into strategizing about the future of textiles, because what I’m describing, what we’re all experiencing in fact, defies easy fixes, or maybe defies any “fix” at all. We are in the midst of an evolutionary change—we are a new sapien—though one can fairly assert that we have always been in the process of evolving.³

For some years now, what I’m calling new, petro-symbiotic marine individuals have arisen from a cooperation of sorts. Mussels and oysters are examples of bivalves known to bioaccumulate petroleum-derived hydrocarbons. While this is often detrimental to them, certain populations have adapted to survive in polluted environments, altering their biochemical processes in response to persistent exposure. Shrimp and crabs, favorites from our Gulf coast waters, can also display behavioral adaptations to oil-polluted habitats; fiddler crabs have been studied in this regard, as has Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua). Studies have identified bioaccumulation of polybrominated diphenyl ethers, common in petroleum-derived textiles, within cod liver and tissues. When we discard hyperfabricated clothing, we also discard petroleum derivatives that persist in marine environments and are ingested by marine species.⁴

Fish are eating the plastics from our clothes and other oil-based pollutants. And then we eat the fish. Again and again. While I admire the prowess and zeal of fellow entrepreneurial scientists looking for solutions, how can we think more in terms of ecological life cycles rather than in terms of current economic systems and products?

Take Mango Materials, based in San Francisco, which developed a manufacturing technology that obtains biodegradable biopolyester fibers (polyhydroxyalkanotes) from waste biogas. The company uses a fermentation technology that involves feeding waste methane gas to nongenetically modified bacteria, which produces a powder that, among other applications, can be melt-spun—as nylon and other synthetic polymers are—to create fibers for textiles. The hook is that when the textiles reach the “end of their life,” they can be converted back to methane via anaerobic digestion. Is reconverted methane what’s needed?

Fish are eating the plastics from our clothes and other oil-based pollutants. And then we eat the fish. Again and again.

Biopolyester has yet to infiltrate the fashion world, but fast-fashion synthetic fibers have decidedly entered our seas. Synthetic fibers dominate the modern textile landscape, comprising 62 percent of all clothing materials. The resilience and affordability of these fibers has made them staples of fast fashion—a phenomenon characterized by rapid production cycles and disposable trends. However, their durability in fabrics has translated to persistence in the environment. Every year, an estimated five hundred thousand tons of synthetic microfibers enter the oceans, equivalent to 50 billion plastic bottles.⁵

Once in the ocean, these fibers are ingested by marine organisms, from zooplankton to larger species like fish and mollusks. The illustrations of beloved fish from our southern waters bring the point home. For filter feeders, such as mussels and oysters, the steady intake of our fast-fashion fibers can cause blockages, nutritional deficiencies, and impaired growth. In fish, studies reveal that bioaccumulation of ingested microfibers can leach chemical additives, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates or bisphenols, for example. These chemicals improve the properties of fibers in clothing, like enhancing their longevity and reducing static electricity, but they also alter the hormonal balance in fish, affecting reproduction, growth, and metabolism. The ubiquity of microfibers ingested by marine life poses risks to human health, as these nanofibers are passed up the food chain, ultimately landing on our dinner plates.

The fast-fashion boom in the 1990s and early 2000s resulted in vast amounts of inexpensive, disposable clothing, oversaturating countries, especially China, North America, and Europe, with used clothing that secondhand markets and thrift stores couldn’t absorb. Charitable organizations and recycling centers began exporting unsold items in bulk to other countries, creating a global flow of secondhand clothing. Many of these textiles were exported to African and Latin American countries. Initially, these waste exports were rebranded as a way to provide affordable clothing in low-income regions. However, as the volumes grew at a staggering rate, so did the social and environmental costs.

African countries are among the largest recipients of discarded fast fashion, receiving over 70 percent of the world’s donated waste clothing. Major destinations include Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. Ghana’s Kantamanto Market (where I visited in the summer of 2024) and similar markets across Africa have become central hubs for imported clothing, even as these imports often contribute to pollution and economic dependency. Ghana, and particularly its capital city of Accra, is one of the most notable cases of fast fashion–dumping in Africa. While some garments find buyers, a large portion of “donated” clothing is of such low quality that it is unsellable or unusable and ultimately discarded. Because of this, an estimated 40 percent of imported textiles end up as waste, leading to overflowing landfills and water pollution. Discarded crop tops, screen-printed jackets, and nylon leggings now linger in the Atlantic’s marine environments from the Gulf of Guinea to the Gulf of Mexico. Sunlight and physical weathering of waves and currents breaks these textiles down into microplastics that remain highly resistant to microbial activity; natural cotton and other cellulose and protein fiber textiles accumulate in ocean sediment, degrading, but slowly, given the sheer volume. As the global fast-fashion industry continues to grow, the need for responsible production, waste reduction, and sustainable practices becomes ever more pressing.

While my visionary self wants to say there is a way forward, my spiritual self, along with my scientifically trained self, says we are in a very deep crisis that has a specific genealogy—a crisis of our own making that we don’t even really understand well, though we are trying. Marine organisms are not merely victims of microfiber pollution—they can also be part of the solution. Observation of other species is key. Biomimicry, while very nested in the existing economy, offers a runway into respectful textile development and production. On the remediation side, scientists are exploring how certain species of fish, mollusks, and marine bacteria metabolize synthetic fibers, breaking them down into less harmful components. Marine bacteria such as Ideonella sakaiensis have shown potential in breaking down plastics, including polyester. Harnessing these microbes through bioengineering could pave the way for textile waste treatment systems that accelerate fiber decomposition before they reach the ocean.

Filter-feeding mollusks like mussels and oysters inadvertently collect microfibers during their feeding processes. Research is underway to determine whether these organisms could be employed in controlled environments to remove microfibers from wastewater before discharge into natural bodies of water. Fungi associated with marine ecosystems offer another intriguing possibility. Certain fungal species can digest complex polymers, suggesting potential applications in breaking down synthetic fibers. Cultivating these fungi in conjunction with seaweed farms could transform aquaculture into a dual-purpose industry: food production and pollution mitigation.⁶

In light of these findings, cellulosic fibers are generally more environmentally friendly in marine settings, offering a less impactful alternative to synthetic fibers. As a result, industries are increasingly considering biodegradable, cellulosic-based textiles as part of sustainable solutions to address fiber pollution in aquatic environments.

Last summer, I traveled to Ghana on a working family vacation with my son. I made a point to visit the Noldor Residency and Gallery to meet its director, Johanes F. Kuwornu Jr., who introduced me to a current artist-in-residence, Emmanuel Aggrey. Aggrey is an Italian-trained Ghanaian civil engineer and textile artist who uses discarded textiles from Kantamanto’s weekly reception of 15 million discarded garments. He and his studio assistants harvest hundreds of thousands of garments a week as raw artistic and scientific material—but then another wave of 15 million garments washes over them the next week.

The saturation of our seas with synthetic textile waste has occurred in a short amount of time, roughly thirty-four years (and just twenty-six years since the publication of Lynn Margulis’s Symbiotic Planet), yet it is indefinitely affecting our futures, inequitably at the beginning and impartially in the end.

Fast Fashion Timeline

1990S // Early Foundations of Fast Fashion

Fashion retailers Zara and H&M pioneered rapid “design-to-rack” cycles emphasizing speed and efficiency. Design-to-store time was reduced from months to weeks. Polyester, popular since its invention in 1935 by DuPont, retained its appeal as inexpensive, durable, and easy to blend with other fibers, making it ideal for fast fashion to emerge as a lucrative business model.

EARLY 2000S // The Fast Fashion Boom and the Rise of Secondhand Exports

Fast fashion is widely adopted across Europe and the United States. Retailers like Forever 21, Topshop, and Primark joined Zara and H&M, bringing high-fashion-inspired looks to the mass market at low prices. Polyester continued to dominate due to its low cost, versatility, and ease of printing and dyeing. Other synthetics, like nylon and spandex, were used to achieve trendy, stretchy, and fitted designs. Blends with cellulosic fibers, like viscose, were also popular, creating softer, more breathable fabrics that mimicked the feel of natural fibers. The flexibility of synthetic and cellulosic blends allowed brands to experiment with styles and adapt quickly to emerging trends, accelerating clothing production and discard cycles.

2010S // Peak Fast Fashion

Social media and influencer culture accelerated clothing and textile trend cycles, pushing new looks and microtrends with unprecedented speed. The fast-fashion model reached its peak in the 2010s, with brands expanding globally and shortening production cycles, which cultivated consumer demand for near-instant gratification. Cheap to produce, polyester and nylon textiles continued to dominate. Newer cellulosic fibers, such as modal and lyocell, were introduced as more ecofriendly options, though synthetic blends remained dominant. Polyester blends were heavily used for stretchy apparel, such as leggings and sports bras, while modal and viscose mimicked the natural fabrics of apparel produced by companies like Patagonia, Tentree, Gap, and Madewell.¹

LATE 2010S–EARLY 2020S // Fast Fashion Critique and Sustainability Push

While fast fashion continued to thrive, a renewed attention to its environmental and social impacts led to a shift. Sustainable and “slow fashion” brands reemerged as alternatives, though the fast-fashion market still grew through online platforms like Shein, which employs an “ultra-fast” model that produces clothing at an even faster rate using sophisticated algorithms to get new styles to market in a matter of days. According to Shein’s marketing materials, the company’s on-demand model generates less waste than traditional supply-driven models because it evaluates consumer feedback in real time, minimizing overproduction and resulting in affordable prices for their customers. Some fast-fashion brands begin using recycled polyester and promoting “eco-friendly” fibers like organic cotton and Tencel (the brand name for modal and lyocell). High rates of consumption, wage earning gaps, and loss of quality manufacturing persist.²

Emmanuel spoke about fast fashion in the context of waste colonialism, which was a term I hadn’t heard before, but it resonated. As an engineer, he was interested in manipulating and repurposing the textiles as new building material for residential houses. As an artist, he was interested in narrating these garments’ histories and imagined futures. What can be done with these soft, indestructible, and distorted portraits of “us”?

While Aggrey uses these discarded textiles in a future-forward studio-laboratory, the point of his work is to use art to make our textiles—the heaving amount of our quickly produced and consumed textiles—visible on social and political fronts.

Aggrey wants to transform not just how we produce textiles, but how we internally and externally identify ourselves with cloth. As cultural and self-expression, contemporary textiles have taken us far from who we are culturally and far from millennia-long traditions of regionally adapted clothing like Scottish tweed and waxed jackets, North African djellaba, Caribbean guayabera, Southeast Asian sarongs, and Indian sarees. Like it or not, synthetic polymer textiles and their aquatic contrails are here to stay. But future systems that are slower and more equitable could help us deal with what we’ve been dealt.

And so here we are. Efforts to build sustainability into a consumer-driven and human- focused system are insufficient. We need a global vision and the political framework to transform the planet. It’s not just about the products. It’s how we relate to each other and all the beings around us. It comes from inside—we need to be in loving relationship with each other. In that way, Fashion Eater is on to something.

I remain ambivalent about our dystopian future with plastic’s insistent and sinister infiltration into the cycle of life. As fashion reaches the innermost parts of marine life, it is simultaneously reaching the inner parts of us. The expressive, refreshing, and exciting brands we once wore on the outside of our bodies become durably and maybe eternally part of our insides. Like the fish, we are consuming fashion.

Makalé Cullen is an ecologist and experience designer with expertise in place-based research, design, and cultural partnerships. Specializing in ethnobotanical research and community-driven projects, she has worked with the Toyota Research Institute, Drexel University, and the New York Botanical Garden. Her forthcoming book, about Manhattan’s Highbridge Park, is titled NOASIS. makale-makale.com

Illustrations by Iris Gottlieb

NOTES

Fashion Eater is an adaptation of Star Eater, a character I cocreated with my former illustrator and friend, fashion designer Cynthia Merhej (https://renaissancerenaissance.com) for my company, Wilderness of Wish.
Michelle C. Melo, Eva Andersson, Per Gunnar Fjelldal, Jan Bogerd, Luiz R França, Geir Lasse Taranger et al., “Salinity and Photoperiod Modulate Pubertal Development in Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar),” Journal of Endocrinology 220, no. 3 (2014): 319–332, https://doi.org/10.1530/JOE-13-0240.
Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (Basic Books, 1998).
Scott Zengel, Steven C. Pennings, Brian Silliman, Clay Montague, Jennifer Weaver, Donald R. Deis et al., “Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Impacts on Salt Marsh Fiddler Crabs (Uca spp.),” Estuaries and Coasts 39, no. 4 (2016): 1154–1163, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12237-016-0072-6; Adri K. Grow, Charles A. Schutte, and Brian J. Roberts, “Fiddler Crab Burrowing Increases Salt Marsh Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Biogeochemistry 158 (January 10, 2022): 73–90, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-021-00886-5; Pierina Visciano, “Environmental Contaminants in Fish Products: Food Safety Issues and Remediation Strategies,” Foods 13, no. 21 (2024): 3511, https://doi.org/10.3390/foods13213511.
Heidi Savelli, “Fashion’s Tiny Hidden Secret,” UN Environment Programme website, March 13, 2019, updated March 2024, https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/fashions-tiny-hidden-secret; “Microplastics from Textiles: Towards a Circular Economy for Textiles in Europe,” European Environment Agency website, February 10, 2022, updated February 10, 2023, https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/microplastics-from-textiles-towards-a.
Munuru Srikanth, T. S. R. S. Sandeep, Kuvala Sucharitha, and Sudhakar Godi, “Biodegradation of Plastic Polymers by Fungi: A Brief Review,” Bioresources and Bioprocessing 9, no. 42 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40643-022-00532-4.

SIDEBAR NOTES

Despite the growing popularity of sustainable and ethically made fashion among younger generations, fast fashion is growing rapidly in volume and profit; Abriana Herron, “The Intention Gap: When Buying and Beliefs Don’t Match,” Fashion Dive, May 22, 2023, https://www.fashiondive.com/news/sustainable-fashion-consumer-demographics-gen-z/650864/. According to research by CoherentMI, in the United States alone, fast fashion was worth “$41.15 Billion in the year 2023 and is anticipated to reach $59.85 Billion by 2030”; “U.S. Fast Fashion Market Size And Share Analysis – Growth Trends And Forecasts (2023 – 2030),” CoherentMI, accessed December 9, 2024, https://www.coherentmi.com/industry-reports/us-fast-fashion-market. This means that fast fashion is showing no signs of slowing down, and more clothing will end up in landfills and secondhand markets around the world; Alyssa Hardy, “Everything You Need to Know about Fast Fashion,” Vogue, April 24, 2024, https://www.vogue.com/article/what-is-fast-fashion. Polyester is derived from petroleum, specifically from crude oil byproducts. Since these byproducts are part of the broader oil refining process, they are abundant and relatively inexpensive. Polyester production benefits from an established global supply chain for petroleum and chemicals, ensuring consistent raw material availability, at scale.
“Our On-Demand Business Model,” Shein website, accessed December 9, 2024, https://www.sheingroup.com/our-business/our-business-model/.