The Fake Fabric Fashion Faux Pas trope is not so much about clothes made out of synthetic material as it is about the people who wear them—and the message conveyed is often not good. For example, putting a character in a polyester suit is often a shorthand way to depict him as an obnoxious boor or a shifty salesman. This trope is also invoked whenever there are jokes about friendships or relationships ending when the other person gets caught wearing or possessing clothes made out of artificial material. The clothing doesn't even have to be something garish and inherently tacky like a leisure suit or disco outfit since even a sedate-patterned or subdued-colored suit, blazer, sport coat, shirt, pants, dress, blouse, skirt, or sweater that's polyester (or polyester-blended) can be enough to make the character a target of ridicule and scorn (especially from someone who's a Fashionista or The Dandy).
The Fake Fabric Fashion Faux Pas trope was at its peak during The '80s when there was a backlash against the garish fashions and polyester-heavy apparel that had been common during The '70s. Clothes made of artificial fabric were still prevalent during the '80s but they and the people wearing them came to be associated with fashion-blindness, lack of aesthetic taste, and plastic suburban life. However, it is now becoming a Dead Horse Trope due to changing attitudes about fashion over the last 30 years. In many professional workplaces, clothing has become a lot more casual and less formal.
(If there is some backlash about wearing synthetic fibers, it will more likely be due to environmental concerns.) Also, this trope depended upon the perceived existence of friction within the middle-class between suburbanites who wore polyester clothes and the Yuppies and Bourgeois Bohemians who only wore natural fabrics. The middle-class, on the whole, has shrunk so much since the 1980s that these intra-class distinctions have nearly disappeared.
Instances of people "ironically wearing" tacky polyester clothes represent a more recent off-shoot of this trope.
Compare with Impossibly Tacky Clothes, I Was Quite a Fashion Victim, and Outdated Outfit. This trope is often used as a Wardrobe Flaw of Characterization and is associated with the Casanova Wannabe, the Disco Dan, the Lounge Lizard, and characters whose fashion sense is Two Decades Behind. Subtrope of Fee Fi Faux Pas.
Examples:
- In the 1980s DC Comics Doc Savage comic book, Vitriolic Best Buds Ham and Monk continue their bickering from the 1930s. One of the things clothes horse Ham attacks Monk for is Monk's appalling fashion sense, including his love of synthetic fibers. Monk's poor fashion choices come back to bite him when he creates a gas to dissolve polymers, forgetting that he is wearing a polyester suit. The gas dissolves his suit, leaving him standing in his Goofy Print Underwear. Ham, who is dressed in all-natural fibers, is immune* and finds the whole thing hilarious.
- In FoxTrot. Jason's attempts to scare Paige with ghost stories prove unsuccessful until he tells her one that ends with "...and when she opened the closet, all the clothes were polyester!"
- Garfield: Jon Arbuckle's love of polyester suits is presented as only one of his many crimes against fashion, albeit not as bad as their out-of-date cuts, eye-watering colors, and odd accessories.
- In Animal House, when Flounder first visits the rush party at the Delta house, the frat brothers quickly comment on Flounder's necktie in a semi-sarcastic tone
- Discussed in My Cousin Vinny, when Vinny gets reprimanded for showing up to court as a defense attorney wearing casual clothes.
Judge Chamberlain Haller: I'll let you off this one time. The next time you appear in my court, you will look lawyerly. And I mean you comb your hair, and wear a suit and tie. And that suit had better be made out of some sort of... cloth. You understand me?
- In Planes, Trains and Automobiles, it's never directly stated but Del Griffith's off-the-rack polyester suit is meant to match his overbearing and occasionally aggravating personality.
- The title and titular opening song of Polyester allude to this trope. The film chronicles the misadventures of Francine Fishpaw, the "Polyester Queen" of the song, a suburban housewife who futilely aspires to a bland, respectable lifestyle yet is incredibly tacky and surrounded by boors. Fittingly, she dresses in tacky polyester housedresses, and her boorish porno theater-owning husband wears polyester leisure suits.
- Invoked in My Teacher Is an Alien — when word gets out that Broxholm will be abducting the smartest child in the school, Mike and Stacy realize they're obviously in the running for that category and stage a fight sparked by the devastating insult that is "your mother wears polyester". They're too nice to come up with genuinely insulting insults.
- In his book Mind Over Matters, Mike Nelson describes his terrible sense of style in the early eighties by referring to his clothing choices as "cheap, tight, and made entirely from petroleum-based fibers".
- Saved by the Bell: Lisa Turtle considers polyester to be absolutely beneath her. In "Slater's Friend" when fantasizing about what her punishment for her "role" in his pet lizard, Artie's, death, she believed wearing a polyester outfit (or getting "curtains") was comparable to "frying" (in a giant frying pan), being "put on ice" (via a large ice cube) and sent to "solitary confinement" (playing the Solitaire card game).
- Sonny with a Chance: A recurring gag throughout the seasons is how Tawni Hart believes this, usually using it as a dig against Sonny's clothes and fashion choices. At one point she relates a humiliating breakup, presenting the worst part being that she was forced to wear "polyester pants".
- On WKRP in Cincinnati, the station's sales rep Herb Tarlek is often ridiculed for the polyester suits he wears but mainly because of their eye-searing patterns and colors.
- On Call the Midwife, Chummy takes to wearing Crimplene, which her Grand Dame mother heartily disapproves of. She even gets married in it, and not white, either.
- Angela Anaconda: In "Kar-lean on me", Karlean is thrown out of Nanette's Girl Posse because she was the only one who bought a designer hat made out of synthetic fur (due to it being cheaper than the real thing).
- On Monster Buster Club, Alpha Bitch Wendy uses this trope to insult Sam's outfit, but Sam retorts that her shirt is 100% cotton with all-natural dyes and textiles.
- Until recently, college graduates entering the professional job market were advised to only wear clothes made of natural materials to their interviews if they didn't want their careers to end before they began.
