Recycling waste poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) textiles faces significant obstacles due to lack of cost-effective and non-destructive technologies to purify PET. Unsuccessful purification led to processing and property problems. PET recycling via depolymerization-repolymerization is economically unviable and environmentally irresponsible. Here we demonstrate a cost-effective and clean fiber-to-fiber recycling technology, converting afterlife apparels into pure and colorless PET followed by fiber spinning and dyeing of the recycled PET fibers with recycled disperse dyes, for the time-efficient and cost-effective PET recycling. The disruption of dye-polymer interactions in PET driven by controlled swelling using environmentally benign solvents ensures a complete dye separation from PET fabrics within less than 30 min. PET with 100% property retention and disperse dyes with the same intact structure and dyeability are recovered via our technology. Given that our recycling obtained pure PET from waste textiles, the fiber-to-fiber recycling potentially has lower material and energy costs than conventional PET production.