Polyester runs through fashion’s online racks—but precisely how much depends on what is being counted.
Nearly three in 10 of the 139,042 product listings examined across 73 fashion retailers contained at least 50 percent polyester, according to an August analysis from materials-search platform Fibr.
The results present an unusually broad snapshot of the compositions retailers publish online, though not of what consumers purchase or how much fiber brands use. The analysis gives every product listing equal weight and does not separately assess whether polyester is virgin or recycled—limitations that complicate comparisons among fast-fashion, activewear and outdoor brands.
Among the retailers highlighted in Fibr’s findings, Girlfriend Collective had the highest proportion of polyester-heavy products—100 percent of 153 listings. Showpo followed at 84 percent of 50 products, while Nasty Gal reached 81.1 percent across 206 listings.
Peppermayo stood at 70.6 percent of 880 listings and Vuori at 65.4 percent of 685. Self-Portrait, Beyond Yoga, Patagonia, Princess Polly and River Island each registered slightly more than half.
Boohoo reached 48.3 percent across 11,360 listings, while Asos stood at 46.2 percent across 13,780. H&M came in at 28.6 percent of 1,400 products, Zara at 25.4 percent of 20,832 and Mango at 22.1 percent of 3,975.
The threshold is important. These percentages represent the share of products containing at least 50 percent polyester, not polyester’s total share of a brand’s fiber consumption. Nor do they indicate how many of those products were produced or sold.
Polyester appeared somewhere in the composition of 38.4 percent of products, according to Fibr. Cotton was present in 40.8 percent, elastane in 30.9 percent, viscose in 15.4 percent and polyamide or nylon in 9.9 percent. The figures overlap because a single product can contain several fibers.
Fibr produced the dataset by extracting composition information published on retailers’ product pages. Under its methodology, each product identifier is counted once within a monthly snapshot, while sizes and colorways offered under the same listing are intended to be consolidated.
The resulting figures are counts of digital product listings rather than measures weighted by sales, production volume, garment weight or revenue. Fibr also does not track the country or storefront from which a listing was collected, limiting comparisons between regional assortments.
Sample sizes vary considerably. Zara accounted for 20,832 listings, while Asos had 13,780, Princess Polly had 12,528 and Boohoo had 11,360. Other brands were represented by fewer than 100 products. The overall findings therefore reflect the size and structure of the included online catalogs as well as their material choices.
The analysis also does not separately assess whether a product’s polyester is virgin or recycled, an important distinction when interpreting the brand rankings.
Girlfriend Collective, for instance, says more than 75 percent of the polyester used in every collection is recycled. Patagonia reports that recycled material accounted for 94 percent of its polyester-based fabrics by weight in spring 2026. Those claims are company-reported and outside the scope of Fibr’s dataset, but they illustrate why the presence of the same fiber does not necessarily indicate identical sourcing practices or production impacts.
Recycled polyester remains a synthetic material and does not eliminate concerns surrounding microfiber shedding, recyclability or dependence on plastic feedstocks. Its production footprint, however, can differ from that of virgin fossil-based polyester.
The findings arrive as the fashion industry struggles to separate economic growth from fossil-fiber consumption. The Apparel Impact Institute’s Taking Stock 2026 report estimated that apparel-sector greenhouse gas emissions rose 6.3 percent in 2024 to roughly 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. It identified increased fiber consumption—particularly polyester—as a primary driver.
Global fiber production reached approximately 132 million metric tons in 2024, according to the report, with polyester accounting for 59 percent.
Fibr’s data cannot show how many polyester products consumers purchased, how much material brands ordered or how quickly those goods moved through stores. What it can show is how routinely the fiber appears across fashion’s digital racks, whether the seller is an ultra-fast-fashion platform, an activewear specialist or a brand built around environmental credentials.
