The Latest Trend in Your Work Wardrobe Stinks

Performance fabrics are moving out of the gym and into everyday clothes. Some men say that stinks.

The fabrics, usually a blend of polyester, spandex and other man-made fibres, have been a mainstay in workout gear for their sweat-wicking properties. Now apparel makers are using them for polo shirts, button-ups and suits. But a work day or wedding lasts a lot longer than a workout, giving the materials time to trap odours, cause breakouts and make you sweatier.

Tim Connon, a life insurance agent in Palmer, Tenn., got tired of adding a cup of baking soda to the wash to remove the mildew smell from his polyester-blend polo shirts, and eventually tossed them out. “It was ridiculous to have to take that extra step when the shirts shouldn’t smell in the first place,” he said.

Connon now wears only 100% cotton shirts, but said they are hard to find and more expensive. They also have to be ironed. “The performance shirts don’t wrinkle, but I couldn’t stand the smell and the itchiness of those fabrics,” the 31-year-old said.

Synthetic fibres repel water, which helps sweat evaporate but allows oil secretions from our bodies to build up on the fabric and trap odors, according to Renae Fossum, a senior director and research fellow at Procter & Gamble.

P&G has upgraded its detergents and introduced new products like Downy Rinse & Refresh, a fabric enhancer that works in the rinse cycle to strip away odours and residue that builds up on synthetic clothes. “We are trying to help consumers understand these issues are not in their head,” said Sammy Wang, a P&G senior scientist who specialises in fabric care.

Polyester is no stranger to friction. The fibre got its start in the 1930s lab of DuPont chemist Wallace Carothers. After Carothers got sidetracked by the discovery of nylon, British scientists picked up the thread and developed the first polyester fibre during World War II. DuPont bought the U.S. rights in 1946.

In the following decades, the fabric elbowed aside natural fibres like cotton, silk, linen and wool, thanks to its lower costs and easy care—you could throw it in the washing machine and let it drip-dry.

It was also suffocating, at least in its earlier forms. Wearing a 1970s polyester leisure suit was like “walking around in a Hefty bag,” said Alan Spielvogel, director of technical services at the National Cleaners Association, a dry cleaners trade group.

Clothing makers eventually added breathability, stretch, waterproofing and stain resistance. As athleisure took hold, polyester took off. Polyester surpassed cotton in 2002 and now outsells all other fibres, according to consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

Covid further fuelled polyester’s growth as people got used to wearing more comfortable clothes while stuck at home.

Although women have adopted performance fabrics for dressier attire, men have been the primary driver of demand because they tend to put a higher value on features like stain and wrinkle resistance, said Kristen Classi-Zummo, an apparel analyst at market research firm Circana.

Dermatologists say that with the popularity of these fabrics, they are seeing a jump in “sweat acne,” which is caused by a yeast that lives on our skin that invades our pores when we perspire.

Erum Ilyas, a dermatologist in King of Prussia, Pa., said sweat acne is more prevalent with performance fabrics in casual or work attire than workout clothes. “When you work out, you usually rinse off afterward,” she said. “If you are wearing a shirt for 8 to 12 hours, you are stuck in that fabric for longer stretches of time.”

She tells patients to try using Head & Shoulders shampoo as a body wash to degrease the skin.

Tyler Cenname, the co-founder of a furniture company, purposely chose a dress shirt made of performance fabric to wear to a Las Vegas wedding in August because he thought it would keep him cooler.

“I actually sweated more than if I was wearing a cotton shirt,” the 24-year-old said. “And I broke out in a rash.”

Zach Klempf, the founder of an automotive software company, bought a moisture-wicking suit to keep him dry when presenting to clients and working trade show booths. He hadn’t counted on the suit absorbing cigar smoke during industry cocktail hours.

“I can’t wear it anymore, because the smell is so off-putting,” said the 32-year-old San Francisco resident. He’s gone back to wool suits.

Some performance-fabric fans say the odours are a small price to pay for the added comfort and absence of armpit stains. To combat the stink factor, some brands treat the fabrics with antimicrobial finishes.

That coating can wear off, according to Tony Anzovino, chief sourcing and merchandising officer at Haggar Clothing, which uses performance fabrics in 70% of its products. Instead, Haggar uses a type of polyester fiber that is spun into a longer yarn called a filament that makes it harder for microbes to attach.

Jonathan Poston, a 48-year-old consultant, who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., wonders if we’re asking too much of our clothes. “In the tech world we call it feature creep,” he said. “The same thing is happening with clothes. They have to tick all these boxes.” He only wears 100% cotton shirts.

“As someone who has to wear a shirt for 14 hours a day, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask my clothes to do a lot,” said Ben Perkins, the co-founder of &Collar, a men’s clothing brand that uses performance fabrics. Nevertheless, Perkins plans to introduce a cotton-blend shirt after customers said they wanted one.

“You need to serve the synthetic majority and the cotton minority,” he said.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

The Latest Trend in Your Work Wardrobe Stinks

Performance fabrics move from workout gear to business attire—with some odorous downsides

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.