Types of Textile Fibers: Natural vs Manufactured

Every fabric you will ever spec begins as a fiber, the smallest, hair-like unit of a textile, any natural or manufactured substance with a high length-to-width ratio and the right characteristics to be processed into cloth. Fibers can be separated back out of a fabric, and how they behave decides almost everything downstream: hand-feel, strength, drape, care, and cost. This is the full classification map, and where each fiber's properties come from.

The two top-level branches

All textile fibers split into two families by origin:

1. Natural fibers - obtained directly from nature.
2. Manufactured fibers - produced through chemical processing.

Everything else is a sub-branch of these two.