We make padel wear from organic cotton, cotton piqué, and heritage loopback jersey. Not polyester, not nylon, not the stretch blends that dominate the court. Here is why.
The problem with synthetic sportswear
Most performance fabric is plastic. Polyester, nylon, elastane. Every wash releases fragments of it into the water system. Independent laundry studies have measured anywhere from several hundred thousand to over a million microfibres shed from a single wash of synthetic clothing, with fleece and heavily textured jerseys, the kind used in technical sportswear, among the worst offenders. Textiles are now estimated to be the largest single source of primary microplastic pollution in the ocean, ahead of tyre dust and cosmetics, accounting for roughly a third of it. The fibres are too small for most wastewater treatment plants to fully filter. They end up in rivers, in soil, in the fish people eat.
Cotton sheds too. All fabric does, natural or synthetic, through friction and washing. The difference is what's shed. A cotton fibre breaks down in the environment the way a leaf does. A polyester fibre is plastic, and behaves like plastic, for centuries. That distinction is the whole argument for natural fibre in sportswear: not that natural fabric leaves no trace, but that the trace it leaves isn't permanent.
Organic cotton, and who it's for
Organic cotton is grown without synthetic pesticides, synthetic fertiliser, or GMO seed. Conventional cotton covers about 2.5% of the world's farmed land but accounts for somewhere between 16 and 25% of global insecticide use. That chemical load doesn't stay on the farm. It's linked to water contamination, soil depletion, and, for the people doing the growing and harvesting, measurably worse health outcomes: skin conditions, respiratory illness, and higher rates of chronic disease in cotton-farming communities.
Organic practice changes the maths on all three fronts. Studies from the Textile Exchange and other industry bodies put organic cotton's water use at roughly 90% lower than conventional, mostly because organic soil retains moisture and many organic farms are rain-fed rather than irrigated. Greenhouse gas emissions run significantly lower too, since organic growing skips the synthetic nitrogen fertiliser responsible for a large share of conventional cotton's carbon footprint. And because there's no toxic spray to apply, the farmers and fieldworkers growing it aren't the ones absorbing the cost.
For the wearer, it's simpler: a fabric grown without chemical residue and finished without heavy metal dyes is a fabric worth wearing next to skin, especially on court, where you sweat into it for a couple of hours at a time.
Cotton piqué, and where it came from
Cotton piqué wasn't developed for fashion. It was developed for tennis, in 1933, by René Lacoste and the knitwear manufacturer André Gillier. Lacoste, a seven-time Grand Slam champion, was tired of playing in long-sleeved woven shirts built for spectators, not athletes. Working with Gillier's mills, he developed a knitted cotton construction with a raised, honeycombed texture: tighter and looser threads worked together so the fabric held its shape, moved air across the skin, and dried fast. It took twelve prototypes to get right.
The result held up because the construction enables the fabric to perform. The raised knit creates air pockets between fabric and skin, so piqué breathes in a way that flat jersey doesn't, and it resists clinging even when wet. That's the same reason we use it: it's a sportswear fabric that happened to migrate into everyday wear, not the other way round.
