You may have seen the terms elastane a lot when looking at material compositions and dress-making. You may also be familiar with the term Spandex as a material that provides a lot of stretch in things like activewear and tight-fitting costumes.
They seem to do pretty much the same thing in terms of adding more elasticity to a garment, so how are they related. The surprising answer is that they are actually the same thing. It all comes down to branding. Elastane is the fiber within the garment and Spandex is the name we give to the material. It is also why you might not hear the term Spandex so much outside of the US.
This starts to make more sense when you look at the name as an anagram. Mix up the letters and you get expands. It sounds like a quick pitch in a boardroom that no one ever tried to improve upon. Nevertheless, Spandex is the name that became familiar, to the point where it is almost synonymous with any stretchy material. If you deal with fabric and clothing in other countries, such as over in the UK, you are more likely to hear the time Lycra for this sort of material than Spandex.
Again, there is that trend of turning a brand or trademark into an everyday term. Head to Germany or Sweden and you are looking at Elastan. This use of a brand as a more general term is actually something we are guilty of a lot when it comes to clothing and dress-making. To me, it has always been Velcro even though this was a specific brand.
Whatever your awareness and use of the terms Lyrca or Spandex, they are the same thing. They are both forms of elastane. The difference comes in their creation. To get to the bottom of the origins of Lycra and Spandex we need to go back to the creation of elastane as a synthetic fiber.
It was invented by chemists at DuPont in Virginia in The aim was to create something that was stretchy enough to replace the rubber and more practical. They looked at how they could modify polyester — a common synthetic material — to produce a resilient stretchy fiber. Eventually, Fiber K was born, and this was soon given the trade name Lycra.
Teams at the Olympics began wearing it and it later became more commercial in exercise clothing. Label vs. Genius vs. Speech vs. Chief vs. Teat vs. Neice vs. Buisness vs. Beeing vs. Amature vs. Lieing vs. Preferred vs. Omage vs. Finally vs. Attendance vs. Latest Comparisons Tubercule vs. Glyptal vs. Faucet vs. Com vs. Destroyable vs. Aboriginal vs. Coelomate vs. Ocean vs. Elastane is a synthetic fabric made out of stretchy elastomers that come from a polymer called polyurethane. Spandex and Lycra make clothing like leggings, underwear, hosiery, and swimwear more stretchy.
Spandex and Elastane are different names for the same stretchy material, while Lycra is a brand name for the same cloth. Nazi Germany wanted to use this material for coating fighter planes and other war-related projects. But they also incidentally created the stretchy elastomers that would become elastane. Based on this, an inventor, chemist Joseph Shiver created Lycra in the late s. Today, the material itself is often called spandex in the United States.
The name elastane also describes the elastic property of this fabric. The term elastane does not belong to a company as a trademark, either. The name Lycra, on the other hand, belongs exclusively to DuPont. They use this brand name to market spandex in the United States.
So, what exactly is this stretchy fabric called elastane, spandex, or Lycra? Whatever you call it, this material begins life in a lab. Like many synthetic fabrics, it goes through several intense chemical synthesis processes.
These chemical reactions turn plastic into a wearable kind of cloth. First, something called prepolymer forms when macroglycol mixes with a monomer called diisocyanate. The prepolymer then mixes with a reactive agent called diamine acid. This starts a dry spinning method, the safest way to produce elastane. This liquid plastic solution spins in a container called a fiber production cell to develop elastomers.
Then the solution squeezes out through a spinneret. When heated, this substance becomes solid fibers. The fibers squeeze out through a nozzle that forces them into a special device that uses air to twist them into threads. Typically, these stretchy threads get added to another material to make it more elastic, such as cotton or polyester.
If you check the label inside your leggings or tights, you will probably find that these garments contain a small percentage of Lycra or spandex. Whatever the name or brand, they all mean the same stretchy elastomer fibers blended into the fabric of your clothing. When blended into polyester, cotton, or wool, it adds just a touch of stretch or a nice form-fitting ability to these less-stretchy materials.
As a fun fact about Lycra, DuPont used a massive ad campaign to promote this modern replacement for rubber in clothing. The company enlisted famous actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Joan Collins to help with promotion! Spandex, elastane, and Lycra are all names used to describe an elastic material made out of polyurethane. Polyurethane has such versatility that you can find it in millions of different uses today.
Today, polyurethane fills mattresses and provides insulation inside walls. It also mixes into paints and even makes roller blade wheels! The invention of this adaptive plastic inspired the development of spandex. As you know from the previous section, making spandex involves altering polyurethane. It turns this plastic into elastomers through complex chemical synthesis.
The original invention of polyurethane had its roots in a wartime need for a replacement for rubber. In contrast, DuPont had peacetime and fashion in mind when they created spandex.
Spandex massively revolutionized the way women wore clothing, especially undergarments! Plus, DuPont wanted to save money and avoid depending on the natural resource of rubber trees. Like most synthetic fabrics, it costs a lot less to make spandex than it does to grow and harvest rubber trees.
Whether you call it Lycra, spandex, or elastane, this stretchy fabric has several special characteristics. These include its elasticity, its resistance to heat, and its durability. The unique characteristic of this material is its ability to stretch and return to its original size. Think of a bungee jumper plunging off a tower. The cord stretches when the jumper reaches the end of the rope.
Then the elastic cord snaps back into its original, shorter size, bringing the jumper back up to the top! This force is what yanks the jumper back to the top, as the elastic returns to its original shape! That said, multiple factors make any given piece of cloth more or less stretchy.
Woven cloth can stretch on the bias diagonally but not vertically or horizontally. On the other hand, knitted cloth has a lot of inherent stretch because of the way the threads loop together. For this reason, adding spandex to a knitted fabric will create a super-stretchy material. Adding spandex to a woven material will give it a little stretch but not so much. This shows that while elastane, spandex, and Lycra have amazing elasticity in their pure form, the amount of stretch varies when they get added into another kind of material.
Spandex has no breathability.
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