Polyester has been about to replace wool since 1941, and every decade has announced the victory before finding the catch. 1941: Two chemists in a Lancashire calico works invent Terylene. The future of clothing, they say. It is a plastic bottle in the shape of a shirt. 1951: DuPont launches Dacron in America. Wash and wear, never needs ironing. It also never breathes, which America discovers in July. 1960s: Crimplene. A suit that never creases and can be heard approaching. Static electricity joins the British dance floor. 1973: Children's polyester pyjamas go up like paper, so they are soaked in a flame retardant called Tris. 1977: Tris is banned for causing cancer. The treated pyjamas are shipped abroad and sold to other people's children. 1979: A Manchester Woolworths burns. Ten dead. Foam and polyester furniture turns a room that used to take seventeen minutes to burn into one that takes three. 1982: HMS Sheffield. Sailors in synthetic uniforms are treated for the fabric melted into their skin. The Navy goes back to cotton and wool. 1993: Fleece is relaunched as the eco fabric, made from recycled bottles. The jumper is now proud of being a bottle. 2006: The US Marines ban polyester shirts in Iraq, because a burning man teaches faster than a brochure. 2016: Scientists put a fleece through a washing machine and count what comes out. Seven hundred thousand fibres, one wash, into the sea. 2020: Polyester fibres found in the human placenta. 2022: Found in human blood and deep in living lungs. 2024: Found in every testicle sampled, and in the plaque of arteries. 2025: Found in the brain. About a spoonful. 2026: Still "the future of clothing". Still melting, still smelling after one wear, still shedding, still sold on the hanger next to a sheep that solved all of it before the pyramids. Eighty-five years of upgrades, and the only fabric in the shop that has never needed a recall is the one standing in a field.