BY DESIGN : A New Name, but the Same Old Polyester

It hung on the rack, so fetching and summery that I was stopped in my tracks. The shirt was scoop-necked, short-sleeved and cobalt blue. When I tried it on, it slid over my skin like quicksilver and clung nicely.

Still, I was nervous. I hadn’t done this in years. It felt foreign to the touch. I was breaking an ancient taboo, one that dated from at least college.

I was buying polyester.

Oh. Excuse me. They call it microfiber now. They say that unlike the polyfibers of old, the new ones breathe. That’s a nice way of saying they don’t retain sweat and trap body odors.

Well, this shirt was certainly a lot more expensive than the polyester of my disco diva days, so maybe there was some merit to that argument. After all, years of laboratory experiments had gone into improving man-made fibers. And all that science doesn’t come cheap.

Feeling like a vegetarian eyeing a Big Mac, I bought it and took it home.

At first, I hid it in the closet, ashamed that my husband, the don of natural fibers, might see it. Ultimately I modeled it for him.

D’ya like it? I asked.

Feels nice. Sheer fabric, he responded, forgetting about mowing the lawn.

“It’s microfiber,” I crowed. “I thought I’d give it a try, since everyone else in the fashion world has. It crops up each season. There must be something to it.”

I wore my new shirt to a wedding shower in an air-conditioned restaurant, then washed it by hand. So far so good.

Then came summer. L.A. summer. Hot, long muggy days.

The next time I put it on, I applied deodorant extra carefully. But even so, I caught a whiff of something unpleasant within just a few hours of arriving at an outdoor barbecue.

Pretending like I was pointing out a neat architectural detail of my host’s house, I raised my arm, turned my head and sniffed discreetly.

Uh-huh.

That smell. I recognized it. I wish I could say it wafted, but the truth is it hung like smog. It was the smell of bad odors that no amount of washing can rinse out. My nose twitched like a rabbit’s.

If Proust was sent into reverie by madeleines, I was sent in a similar state by that smell. It evoked the 1970s. Crowded buses in poor parts of Central Europe. A bachelor uncle who has since passed on.

In our scrubbed, perfumed, toned and fit world, “thou shalt not smell” is the 11th commandment. Breaking it branded me an olfactory outcast.

Muttering excuses to friends, I scurried home to strip out of the offending garment and take a shower. Only after donning a vegetable-dyed, 100% Egyptian cotton shirt did I feel better.

I realized I had been seduced by marketing. By a garment industry desperate to create a buzz for the coming season. I had fallen for the fashion equivalent of a sow’s ear tricked up as a silk purse.

But the apparel industry doesn’t exist solely on my meager purchases. Millions of other women must deal with the same problem each time they slip on their cool microfiber outfits. How do they cope?

I’m waiting for an answer. That pretty cobalt blue shirt lies in a crumpled heap in a spare closet. I can’t bear to throw it out yet. But I also can’t bear to put it back on. It stinks.