Nylon Mob

BRIAN: Our next object comes to us compliments of the DuPont Chemical Corporation. DuPont made its fortune in the 19th century manufacturing gunpowder and other explosives. But in the 1920s, with its bottom line secure, the company decided to branch out. Executives decided to invest in scientific research that they hoped would yield prestige, if not necessarily profit. The new division was jokingly nicknamed Purity Hall. The company recruited some of the country’s most promising young chemists. One of them was a Harvard man named Wallace Carothers.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: They set him up with very expensive laboratory with no request that he makes anything that will make them a profit.

BRIAN: This is Susannah Handley, a textile researcher based in Paris. She says Carothers’ experiments made DuPont even richer, and something of a household name. Those experiments also sparked a revolution that fundamentally altered American manufacturing, which leads us to our next object– nylon stockings.

MAN: Here’s a piece of a cloth we make from coal and other things. It’s called nylon.

BOY: But how can a soft thing like this come from a hard thing like a piece of coal?

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: It’s basically a– a polymer? It’s very difficult to explain.

MAN: This is adipic acid, and this is hexamethylenediamine.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: Tiny, tiny, tiny molecules joined together in limitless length.

BOY: Hexa– hexa– say, Mr. Norton, how can you remember a name like that?

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: It became like a petrochemical necklace, and it could make really, really long, and really, really strong, and really durable, to some extent– and elastic.

MAN: And here’s a full bobbin of bright, silky nylon yarn.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: This sort of whole masculine molecular world began a collision between the most feminine of items, stockings.

ANNOUNCER: Better things for better living– through chemistry.

BRIAN: DuPont saw a market for its unexpected discovery. At that time, women’s stockings were made from fragile, imported raw silk, far too expensive for the average woman. But DuPont was willing to bet millions of women would spring for pricey stockings if they were strong enough to last. And so the company began courting women with a national advertising campaign two years before nylons were ready for the market.

ANNOUNCER: And DuPont chemists are working to develop fibers that will be even finer, softer, tougher, and less expensive than those we have now– stronger than steel wire of the same cross-section.

BRIAN: As strong as steel.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: Steel.

BRIAN: As strong as steel!

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: That’s what they said. And they had great big promotional shows. They had the Nylon Bride. It was in all sorts of magazines, as well, where everything the bride was wearing and everything in her boudoir was constructed from nylon materials.

[LAUGHTER]

And they had very expensive exhibits created at World Fairs. They hired the most attractive models available at the time, put them in nylon stockings, paraded them around the World Fair. They were very proud of this potential to sell their fiber.

BRIAN: And even though nylons cost a lot more than silk stockings initially, they had a major advantage over silk.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: You know, it was advanced. It was futuristic. All synthetics in the 20th century presented a new thrill– new materials, new ships, new forms, all these new products that were made from plastics. And ball gowns made from synthetic fibers were the herald of a new future, you know? It was very contemporary, very modern.

ED: But then practically overnight, nylon stockings vanished from department stores.

ANNOUNCER: America goes to war. Men of the Army, Navy, and Marines–

ED: When the US entered World War II, DuPont began producing nylon for the troops in parachutes, ropes, and hammocks. And suddenly, one of the most coveted consumer products in America became virtually unattainable. Women who couldn’t get their hands on actual stockings found creative ways to attain the coveted nylon look.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: By staining their legs and drawing a line down the back with a crayon, which indicated the seam of the stocking.

BRIAN: But it wasn’t until the war ended in 1945 that Americans understood the full impact of the synthetics revolution. Just months after Japan’s surrender, small shipments of nylon stockings went on sale again in a limited number of stores. Women were eager to get their hands on evidence of America’s return to normalcy– really eager.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: In New York, there were 30,000 women. They were called the Nylon Mob. And perhaps husbands included, I’m not sure. And in Pittsburgh, 40,000. And the newspapers made great heyday from all these women.

BRIAN: Yeah, I’m looking at one of these headlines right now from Pittsburgh. “Nylon Mob, 40,000 Strong, Shrieks and Sways For Miles.”

WOMAN: Pittsburgh Press, June 13, 1946. “A good old-fashioned hair-pulling, face-scratching fight broke out in the line shortly before midnight. Police had to swarm in and restore order. A few who tried to slip into the line were shouted out with screams that could be heard for blocks. Some of the language used would have shocked a Boston fish peddler. As the last of the crowd melted away, a patrolman summed it up. ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘I hope I never see another woman.'”

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: I don’t think the world had witnessed anything quite like that– perhaps in the 1960s with Beatlemania, where it was complete obsession and hysteria– that greeted a strange material. That’s what was unusual. It wasn’t linked to a person, a personality, or anything. It was linked to having something flattering and sheer and fitting on your legs, which gave you a kind of social status of desirability.

BRIAN: Handley says this hunger for nylon stockings reflected the desire among Americans to embrace a new era of prosperity, a desire that industry was more than happy to satisfy.

SUSANNAH HANDLEY: You need a convergence of situations to make a new invention really work. The chemical industries, the textile manufacturing industries, the fashion industries, and not least of all– perhaps most of all– the marketing industries. It has to be the right moment. I mean, the rest of Europe was pretty devastated, but there was America, the symbol of the Coca-Cola. Everybody could have this symbol of plenty. And nylon just hit the right moment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: Susannah Handley is a textile researcher and the author of Nylon: The Story of a Fashion Revolution. Special thanks to historian Jeff Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History.