Polar fleece
insulating napped or pile fabric, sometimes knitted and often made from polyester
Polar fleece is a soft fabric made from polyester that is napped and insulating.
PolarFleece is a trademark registered by Malden Mills (now Polartec, LLC) with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 6, 1981. Malden Mills developed polar fleece in 1979.
Uses
Polar fleece is used in jackets, hats, sweaters, sweatpants, cloth diapers (nappies), gym clothes, hoodies, pajamas, blankets, and high-performance outdoor clothing. The produced fleece can be used to create clothes that are very light, soft, and easy to wash. Polar fleece can stretch more easily in one direction than in others.
History
Polar fleece originated in Massachusetts in 1979 when Malden Mills and Patagonia developed Synchilla (synthetic chinchilla). It was a new, light, strong pile fabric meant to mimic, and in some ways surpass, wool. Malden Mills CEO Aaron Feuerstein intentionally declined to patent polar fleece, allowing the material to be produced cheaply and widely by many vendors, leading to the material's quick and wide acceptance. Malden Mills registered PolarFleece as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 6, 1981.
The public source identifies “Polar fleece” as insulating napped or pile fabric, sometimes knitted and often made from polyester. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Polar, fleece and insulating.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1143415. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Polar fleece” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.