Wear Plastic mimics the visual language of activewear so convincingly you might try to add it to your cart.
–KL Dunn
This past spring, Eliza Corderman ran the London Marathon in a pair of bright yellow shorts.
Where most runners carry the logo of one of the handful of brands that dominate the sport, hers read, in bold black type: wear plastic.
For 26.2 miles, she sweated through the same petroleum-derived synthetics as nearly everyone around her—nylon, polyester, spandex, the entire engineered chemistry of modern performance apparel—while wearing, in the space normally reserved for a swoosh or a wordmark, the name of the material itself.
The gesture captured the central tension at the heart of Wear Plastic. Presented as an activewear brand, the project explores one of the most overlooked contradictions in contemporary wellness culture: our relentless pursuit of health while wrapped in petroleum-derived fabrics.
Eliza created a pop-up shop styled exhibition space for her wear plastic collection.
Developed in Pratt Institute’s MFA Fashion Collection + Communication program, Wear Plastic isn’t actually a brand at all. It borrows the visual language of contemporary activewear marketing—the polished branding, aspirational imagery, and promises of optimization—to question the synthetic materials that have become synonymous with health, fitness, and performance.
As athletes and wellness enthusiasts, many of us devote enormous attention to what enters our bodies, scrutinizing ingredient labels and debating the merits of organic food, supplements, and clean living. Yet the clothing we wear during our workouts, often for hours at a time and in direct contact with our skin, rarely receives the same level of scrutiny.
At first glance, however, the project feels remarkably real. Someone scrolling the website could easily mistake it for the launch of a new activewear brand. That reaction is entirely intentional.
“Absolutely,” Eliza says. “Wear Plastic is designed to look and feel familiar, mirroring the aesthetics and visual language of many contemporary health and activewear brands. By first bringing people into a world that they recognize, it creates an opportunity to incorporate elements that are unexpected.”
For Eliza, the project emerged from personal experience rather than abstract research. A lifelong athlete and longtime yoga practitioner, she spent years wearing the same synthetic activewear that dominates the market today without giving much thought to what it was made from.
“I grew up playing sports and have been practicing yoga for well over a decade, and for most of that time I never really questioned the materials I was wearing,” she says. “Every image associated with athleticism and nearly every major activewear brand reinforced the idea that synthetic fabrics like polyester, nylon, and spandex are the best and the only ones to wear.”
That changed as she began learning more about synthetic fibers and the environmental and health concerns increasingly associated with them. Suddenly, the experience of sweating through a heated yoga class felt different.
“Whereas before I viewed my heated yoga practice as a healthy cleanse or even a detox, this research introduced a new uncertainty about how my clothing might be interacting with my body,” she says. “This irony is what led me to develop Wear Plastic.”
The project evolved over three semesters where conversations about waste, production systems, and circularity encouraged her to look more critically at aspects of fashion that had previously felt invisible. Just as important, those discussions helped clarify what kind of sustainability communication she wanted to create.
What makes Wear Plastic particularly effective is its refusal to lecture. Sustainability messaging often arrives wrapped in guilt, urgency, or moral certainty. Eliza became interested in finding another way into the conversation.
“There is a lot of information out there pointing out the bad behavior of consumers and the fashion industry,” she says. “When hearing about the negative impacts of fashion on our planet and bodies, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by fear or guilt, or simply discouraged.”
Instead, Wear Plastic relies on satire and visual contradiction. A sports bra packaged like supermarket meat. Nutrition facts reimagined as fabric content labels. Branding that feels familiar enough to draw viewers in before revealing something slightly unsettling underneath. The project invites people to laugh first and then spend a little more time with the discomfort hiding beneath the humor.
That approach feels particularly relevant at a moment when sustainability communication often struggles to balance urgency with engagement. People are exhausted by being told that every choice they make is wrong. Wear Plastic recognizes that reality and creates space for curiosity rather than defensiveness.
One of the project’s most effective devices is the connection it draws between food and clothing. In fitness culture, people are encouraged to read ingredient labels, monitor nutrient intake, and think critically about what they consume. Clothing rarely receives the same scrutiny.
“We are encouraged to read ingredient labels carefully and think critically about what enters our bodies,” Eliza says, “but that same level of awareness rarely extends to clothing.”
The comparison feels increasingly relevant as conversations about health become more sophisticated. Consumers have learned to ask where food comes from, how it is processed, and what ingredients it contains. Wear Plastic asks why those same questions are so rarely applied to the textiles that surround us every day.
The answer is partly structural. Polyester currently accounts for the majority of performance apparel because it is lightweight, durable, stretchy, moisture-wicking, and relatively inexpensive. Consumers have become accustomed to those characteristics, while alternatives often struggle to match them on performance, cost, or availability.
Still, Eliza remains optimistic.
“I feel hopeful that this same level of innovation and research can be directed toward developing alternative materials that better align with long-term environmental and human health concerns,” she says. “I don’t think change will happen overnight, but I believe that a growing awareness surrounding materials and transparency has the potential to slowly influence both consumer expectations and the direction of the industry itself.”
Part of what gives the project its strength is that Eliza never claims to have solved the problem she is examining.
As a yoga instructor, athlete, and marathon runner, she continues to wear many of the same synthetic garments explored throughout the work. Wear Plastic emerges from participation rather than distance.
“I still participate in many of the same consumer habits explored throughout the project, and I understand why these garments have become so dominant within fitness culture,” she says.
That honesty feels especially relevant within sustainability conversations, where solutions are often presented as straightforward and individual choices as clear-cut. The reality is far messier. Most people are navigating systems they did not create, relying on products for which there are still few practical alternatives. Wear Plastic acknowledges that complexity while asking us to pay closer attention to the materials we have learned to accept without question.
The London Marathon shorts embodied that tension perfectly. Despite her research into synthetic performance fabrics, Eliza still chose conventional athletic apparel for the race itself. The difference was that she made the material impossible to ignore.
“Rather than pretending I had fully stepped outside of those contradictions, I used this as an opportunity to place that material tension front and center within a highly visible public space,” she says.
Ultimately, Wear Plastic aims to shift the conversation as a first step toward meaningful change. It asks what might happen if we paid as much attention to the materials touching our bodies as we do to the foods entering them. It challenges the assumptions embedded within wellness culture and invites us to reconsider what we have normalized in the pursuit of health.
In an industry often focused on selling the next product, the next innovation, or the next sustainable solution, Wear Plastic does something far simpler. It encourages us to look more closely at what is already there. Once you notice the contradiction, it becomes surprisingly difficult to unsee.
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