Abstract: With the increasing textile industry demand for personalized fiber product, leading to the development and application of new fiber, sea-island microfiber become one of the representative new textile materials. Recently, the sea-island microfiber received extensive attention of researchers as a new composite fiber in high technology and high added value. In order to have a comprehensive understanding of the development of sea-island microfiber nonwovens at present, based on the development of sea-island microfiber nonwovens, the paper focused on the development of preparation technology-conjugate spinning and compound spinning, and the melt spinning. Based on the characteristics of sea-island microfiber nonwovens, the applications of the products in the fields of fashion fabrics, microfiber leather, filtration materials, high-performance cleaning cloth and biomedical materials are comprehensively introduced, and the future research orientations of the products are prospected.