Nylon’s sleekness took on the fashion industry, replaced silk as the material for women’s stockings, and then spawned a new family of fabrics, such as Lycra and PVC, as well as a group of materials called elastomers, without which all our clothes would be baggy and our pants would fall down. Vinyl changed music, how we recorded it and how we listened to it, and along the way it created rock stars. And silicone—well, silicone turned imagination into reality by creating a plastic form of surgery. Without plastics, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—and all other movies—would never have existed;
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