More than 3,000 textile and apparel professionals gathered in Raleigh, N.C., for TechTextil 2019, a much stronger attendance than Chicago in 2017—not surprising, really, since such much of the U.S. industry is centered in the Southeast. The event attracted 165 exhibitors, 91 of whom are new, demonstrating the vibrancy of the industry and the importance of the show. As I walked around the show floor, I saw standing-room-only crowds at the Tech Talks and Lab sessions, as well as lots of great conversations between exhibitors and attendees—and between exhibitors who are exploring new relationships. One especially interesting Tech Talk covered a technology developed at Thomas Jefferson University under the direction of Dr. Mark Sunderland branded as Black Hemp, a high-performance industrial hemp fiber that ticks all the boxes in terms of sustainability.

While there’s a lot to cover with 165 exhibitors, a few things stood out to me on my first day at the show. Right at the bottom of the escalators, the first booth you see is Kyorene, a manufacturer of graphene-reinforced fibers. It’s a versatile (and relatively new!) material that garnered the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in the UK “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” In its press release, the committee stated: “Graphene is a thin flake of carbon, just one atom thick.…As a material it is completely new—not only the thinnest ever but also the strongest. As a conductor of electricity, it performs as well as copper. As a conductor of heat, it outperforms all other known materials. It is almost completely transparent, yet so dense that not even helium, the smallest gas atom, can pass through it. Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.”

Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, the developers of Kyorene’s graphene-reinforced fibers, won a Nobel Prize in Physics for the material.