Where does Polar fleece come from?
Polar fleece comes from Lawrence, Massachusetts. In the late 1970s Malden Mills, a family textile company that specialised in baby bunting, turned polyester into a light, warm rival to wool, and because the fabric was never patented, fleece soon spread everywhere.
Polyester that works like wool
Wool was warm, but it itched, it smelled when wet and moths ate it. Under the mill's owner, Aaron Feuerstein, a team of engineers at Malden Mills wound superfine polyester yarn into a dense fabric like a lighter terry cloth. Brushing the fibres greatly increased its volume, so it held in warmth and wicked water away. Feuerstein's grandfather Henry had founded the company in 1906, and Aaron had worked there since 1947.
From the mill to everyone
In 1981, working with Yvon Chouinard, owner of a then little-known mountaineering outfitter called Patagonia, Feuerstein brought the fabric to the sportswear market. Its first version was called Synchilla, for 'synthetic chinchilla', and Malden Mills registered PolarFleece as a trademark on 6 October 1981. Feuerstein never patented the fabric, so other makers could produce it cheaply. Within a decade fleece had become part of everyday life, and from 1993 makers worked on fleece from recycled material.
Why people say New Zealand
The name points to sheep: a fleece is the woolly coat of a sheep, and polar fleece was made to rival wool. But it contains no wool at all. It is polyester, a plastic, and some fleece is even made from recycled PET bottles. It holds less than 1% of its weight in water and dries quickly, although it loses most of its warmth when wet. Its home is a Massachusetts textile mill, not sheep country.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Polar fleece ↗ · nytimes.com ↗ · cbsnews.com ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Malden Mills ↗
