This paper explores the background and development of a largely forgotten group of
regenerated protein fibers made from vegetable and animal proteins such as corn, peanuts, soybeans,
milk, and egg white in Europe, America, and Japan. Two generations of these fibers are identified.
The first group, produced around the turn of the nineteenth century, was trying to emulate silk. The
second, intended to emulate wool, was produced under wartime political and economic pressures
during and after World War II and only had a brief commercial life. Their complex but short-lived
trajectory is bound up with different—and shifting—attitudes to the synthetic and to ersatz materials. Their changing status from exciting, modernist, patriotic, and fashionable fibers to failed,
forgotten fibers is mapped and analyzed using Thompson’s rubbish theory. This theory explores the
practices of value creation and is here used to illuminate their slippage from cultural memory and
their consequent representation—or the lack of it—within museum collections.