It was minus 35 degrees here in Montana the other night. When I went outside to give the dogs their bathroom breaks, or spent 45 minutes shoveling snow off of the driveway and sidewalks, I didn’t do it in merino base layers or down insulation. As I was standing there, nice and toasty, I realized every single item of clothing I was wearing was made of synthetic fibers.
That moment was a revelation, a total one-eighty from my previous attitudes on clothing. I remember buying my first pair of synthetic base layers 20 years ago—I was too broke to afford the merino alternatives at the time—and dreading their scratch and stink every time I needed to put them on. When I donned my first synthetic puffy jacket on a visit to Detroit in January in the early 2000s and I can’t shake the memory of how cold I felt the entire time I was there.
It’s no surprise that I viewed the ever-advancing performance claims about new synthetic fibers’ odor fighting and sweat wicking with a big dose of skepticism ever since, and kept wearing wool and down—materials whose performance benefits are so established they need no…
