“In her white ensemble, she looks every bit the ageless fashion icon. Her straight skirt, falling to mid-calf, ends in a precise fringe, its sharp lines contrasting with her softly knitted bustier. A scarf tossed insouciantly around her neck completes the look. Its navy borders and the matching ribbon in her upswept hair add a touch of sophisticated color. You won’t find this Barbie in the toy department … She and her one-of-a-kind outfit live in an office at MIT … Dr. Svetlana Boriskina uses Barbie to model her vision of future apparel.“
The quote above is from Virginia Postrel’s book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, published by Basic Books in 2020.
The Barbie and her SVETEX apparel were necessary to convince people that the idea of making clothes from polyethylene was not completely crazy. “Impossible” was the most common first reaction to this idea, and the typical arguments were: (i) polyethylene is hydrophobic, (ii) it’s undyeable, (iii) it will add more plastic waste, and – finally – (iv) if it were possible, the textile industry would have made it already.
We knew it was possible because we already made PE textile prototypes. Our models also predicted that PE textiles will provide unparalleled functionalities for passive thermoregulation, so we just had to disprove points (i) to (iii). The challenge has been accepted and the SVETEX journey has begun… In the past five years, Dr. Svetlana Boriskina and her META Lab at MIT have demonstrated that (i) PE textiles can be engineered to wick moisture more efficiently than any other common textile material, (ii) they can be spin-dyed with standard textile dyes and pigments as well as with custom-engineered nanomaterials, while simultaneously providing stain- & microbial-resistance, and (iii) SVETEX fabrics have smaller environmental footprint than any other natural or synthetic textile and their monomaterial nature makes possible to achieve the elusive full garment circularity.
Since 2019, SVETEX textile technology has won a TechConnect Innovation Award and an MIT Water Innovation prize, was a semi-finalist in a Microfiber Innovation Challenge run by the Flotilla Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and Conservation X Labs, and has been nominated for the EarthShot prize. It also caught and eye of the US Army and Navy, Nike, New Balance, and Under Armour, and is being adapted as a key element in the automotive insulation, as a multi-functional radiation-shielding layer in a new generation of space garments, and as a thermoregulating textile envelope for naval operators and vehicles.
Tunable moisture transport
A video showing a quick moisture wicking behavior exhibited by the optimally-engineered SVETEX textile, proving the PE fabrics moisture transport properties can be tailored on demand, from super-hydrophobic to fully hydrophilic.
Sustainable coloration
SVETEX fibers spin-dyed with textile dyes and Silicon nanoparticles.
Low environmental footprint