FREE TO MOVE
Cast your mind back to a time before LYCRA® fiber.
It’s the 1950s, you’re a woman working a secretarial, retail, or teaching job. You’re wearing nylon stockings every day, held up by garters, worrying constantly about runs, ladders, bagging, sagging, and crooked seams. On your body is a rigid shirtwaist dress or crisp skirt suit, and on your feet a pair of leather pumps or kitten heels. Even stay-at-home mothers are wearing tailored dresses and low heels, or perhaps stiff, fitted pedal pushers on more casual days.
None of it is particularly comfortable, all of it is a cultural norm.
But then, after 1958, LYCRA® fiber hits the market. It’s a remarkable textile innovation that adds stretch and recovery to fabrics. In time, skirts and dresses allow you to breathe, stockings and pantyhose hold their shape, intimate apparel is more forgiving and form-fitting, and pants have some give in the waist. There’s a shift.
“LYCRA® fiber gave women the freedom to move and be comfortable,” said Rita Ratskoff, a senior strategic account manager and 30-year employee of The LYCRA Company. “Women’s clothes weren’t comfortable back then, but you didn’t know any different. You always had to pull up your tights, but you just accepted that that’s the way it was. Adding LYCRA® fiber, it gave you a sense of comfort that you didn’t know you were missing until you experienced it.”
A REVOLUTION IN COMFORT
LYCRA® fiber was transformative for women’s apparel — and women’s lives. No longer were women yanking up their pantyhose all day or dealing with stiff fabrics that restricted their movement. They could get up and down more easily with their children, sit and move more comfortably at work, and fit into their clothes no matter how their bodies were changing.
Even swimsuits, long made to fit with tools like shirring, boning, and strategically placed seams, became more comfortable and enjoyable to wear, not to mention the benefits for designers, who could be more creative with patterns, printings, and fabric construction.
“If you create a garment that boosts a woman’s confidence and promotes freedom of movement while simultaneously enhancing her natural features, I would say that you are empowering them through clothing,” said Tammie Dingle, The LYCRA Company’s regional North and South America brand certification leader.
BODY POSITIVE
In its early days, LYCRA® fiber was used primarily in intimate apparel for shaping and sculpting a woman’s body; it replaced rubber in girdles, for example, and added a more comfortable fit to bra bands.
Later, though, as textile machinery caught up, LYCRA® fiber could be added to ready-to-wear fabrics, and then another shift began.
“Everyday fabrics were starting to have stretch — your shirts didn’t crease, your jeans fit you better,” said Denise Sakuma, The LYCRA Company’s vice president of brands, marketing communications, and merchandising and a 30-year company veteran who led LYCRA® fiber’s entry into ready-to-wear. “You want to show off your silhouette, your shape, and you also have to be able to move. Today’s generation doesn’t know a world without stretch, but it was really a big change. That’s why we must always be innovating with LYCRA® fiber.”
This was a boon for women, whose bodies naturally change throughout the month and over their lifetimes.
“Women’s weight fluctuates throughout the month, so having something that’s going to move with you matters,” said Rita, who worked as a buyer in a major department store before joining The LYCRA Company. “With LYCRA® fiber, your jeans fit you today, and they’re still going to fit you two weeks from now.”
LYCRA® fiber also played an important role in the body-positivity movement and the demand among consumers for more comfortable, well-fitting clothing at every size. No longer were women required to shrink themselves to fit smaller sizes or deal with painful squeezing and pinching — with LYCRA® fiber, fashionable apparel became more accessible to all.
“Plus-size women want to feel as beautiful, confident, and trendy as straight-size women,” said Tammie. “The LYCRA Company began working on this some years ago and created LYCRA® ADAPTIV fiber, which accommodates a variety of body shapes, makes clothes easier to put on, and provides the second-skin feel many women love.”
LET’S GET CASUAL
The broad adoption of LYCRA® fiber across garment categories contributed to the casualization of dress. As people became accustomed to wearing stretch fibers, they found more and more opportunities to do it — activewear became more stylish and left the gym, stretchy jeans entered the workplace, and athleisure became a category of its own. The consensus? It's 100% possible to look stylish and put together without having to be uncomfortable.
THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT
With 65 years of innovation behind us, The LYCRA Company continues to innovate, and to empower women to make the best choices for their bodies and lives. Our fibers have played a role in every cultural shift over the past six decades, and we have no plans to stop evolving and meeting women's needs.
“There are a lot of gaps when it comes to fit, quality, and freedom of movement,” said Tammie, who’s worked with LYCRA® brand for 27 years. “So when you have a fiber that gives a little more and feels good even if your body changes a bit, you’ve created something special.”
Together with our brand and mill partners, we’ve enabled you to show up, supported, empowered, and ready, since our beginning. On International Women’s Day — and every day — we’re all in for the freedom to move and empowering women to perform at their best.