By Sue Hostetler
Synthesized World
Man-made (adjective): made by humans rather than occurring in nature; made to imitate something else; of substances, made by chemical reaction rather than extracted from a natural source.
Diamonds and polyester. It is seriously hard to imagine what these seemingly disparate substances could ever have in common. One is brilliant and beautiful, remarkable for its extreme hardness and adorns the décolletage of ladies all over the world. The other is unremarkable for its historically drab functionality and bargain-basement pricing. This fabric hasn’t been taken seriously by the fashion community since John Travolta donned his infamously funkadelic white three-piece polyester suit in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever.
But it’s a new (man-made) age and now synthetic is all the rage. I never thought I would utter these words, but in 2008, faux diamonds and polyester couture are a girl’s best friend. You can’t swing a Birkin bag on the ultra-chic shopping street Tverskaya in Moscow without knocking over an oligarch’s wife bedecked in Balenciaga’s latest poly-blend dress and a door knob-sized manufactured canary yellow diamond on her finger.
Lets start with polyester. Shockingly, it is the most widely used man-made fiber in the world (who knew?). But this includes a lot of fill to stuff pillows, cushion padding and drapery – far from designer clothing. So how has the much-maligned fabric, made from something as un-sexy as petrochemicals, been reborn as a super-luxury material that was all the rage in February during Paris fashion week?
Over the last few years, the largest fabric producers – primarily based in Japan – have literally recreated synthetic fabrics like polyester and ultra-suede, producing some of the most light, luxurious and delicate materials ever seen. Huge companies like Komatsu Seiren are perfecting and expanding their technology in making the fabrics and refer to themselves as “modern-day artisans… continuing to apply our vast experience and artistic sensitivity to create products of beauty… materials with completely new feel and function.” Alber Elbaz, head designer for fabled French house Lanvin, received a standing ovation when he trotted several 5,800 USD poly-evening gowns down the runway at his show. The company describes the collection as “techno fabrics [that] fly into a new couture galaxy… scarf-like dresses flit from night to day as absolute moments of pure sensuality.” This is clearly not disco polyester.
Synthetic diamonds have been in the making for years and I’m not talking cheesy cubic zirconia. These are real gem-quality diamonds being grown in laboratories – and they are all but indistinguishable from the stones you can buy at Graff. In just three or four short days a man-made diamond can be created – instead of the average three million years it takes for the geological process. The even better news is the price for this lab-grown ice is up to one-third the price of a mined-diamond. Considering that diamond prices have climbed steadily over the last five years and may reach an all-time high this year, the new synthetic option may come as good news to bling-lovers everywhere.
Over 50 years ago, scientists at General Electric came up with a process of using room-sized machines to transform carbon at high pressure into small industrial diamonds, but actually creating the pure – and more importantly large – stones remained elusive until the late 1990s. At that time researches started focusing on two different technological processes: a variation of the process mentioned above, where carbon is literally crushed and heated at 2,300° Fahrenheit; and CVD, or chemical vapor deposition – where you can literally see single-crystal diamonds growing in the midst of hot pink vapors and gas, thereby mimicking conditions 100 miles underground that existed at the beginning of the universe.
I know what you’re thinking. Can the average person – you or I – tell the difference between the man-made and the mined goods? The answer seems to be a resounding no – aesthetically, as well as chemically, the diamonds are identical and cannot be differentiated by the naked eye or even a microscope. This obviously makes the issue of full disclosure at the point of sale quite critical to ensure consumers don’t feel that they are being duped when buying the man-made stuff. (Most labs laser-inscribe their diamonds, which can be seen by looking through a jewelers loop).
The largest labs – Gemesis and Apollo appear to be the front-runners – have good incentive to perfect their process quickly: last year the diamond market was a 72 billion USD global business. They recently won a huge victory that should finally give synthetic stones the respect and mass appeal that they are due – both the Gemological Institute of America and the European Gemological Laboratory agreed to begin grading the quality of the man-made rocks. It appears that Mother Nature’s patent on the creation of diamonds has just expired.
