What a clothing label is legally required to say

The tag inside a collar is the most regulated piece of writing on a garment and the least read. Three federal rules decide what goes on it, and once you can read them, a page of marketing copy becomes optional.

This guide walks the tag top to bottom, quoting the rules that put each line there, and it ends with the line that is not on the tag at all, and why.

The first line on almost every tag is the fibre content, and it is governed by the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act and its regulations. The rule is fussy about words on purpose.

No abbreviations, no ditto marks, no asterisks leading to a footnote. The fibre has to be named in full, next to its percentage, where you can read it. That is why a tag says polyester and not poly, and spandex and not a trade name with a star after it.

The other half of the fibre rule is the threshold. Fibres present at five per cent or more of the weight must be named. Below that they disappear into the words other fiber, and that is the reason a garment can contain a small amount of something useful and never say so.

For everyday clothing the number to read is the spandex. It tells you how the garment will stretch, how it will recover, and how it will react to heat, and the sizing guide on this site turns it into a size decision.

The blends above are counted from the pieces in this catalogue that state one. Where a piece does not, its page carries no fabric line, because we print what the tag says and nothing the tag does not.

Below the fibre line come the care instructions, governed by a separate Federal Trade Commission rule. It requires four things in order, and it is specific about each.

Washing comes first, and it has to answer one question before anything else:

Then drying, which is a separate required line rather than an afterthought:

Some other method is the phrase to notice. It covers flat drying and line drying, and it appears on most knits because a dryer is the fastest way to stretch a knit permanently. The care guide on this site explains the mechanism.

Ironing is the line that is required only when needed:

So a tag with no ironing line is a tag on a garment that does not need one. That is not an omission. It is information.

Bleach is the line people read backwards. The rule requires a warning only when every bleach would harm the garment:

Which means silence on bleach is permission, in the quietest voice the law has. For dyed knits the practical advice is still no, for reasons of colour rather than damage.

The care rule requires the label to be permanent and to stay legible for the useful life of the garment. That single requirement explains the woven tag that scratches your neck: a printed label would wash off, and a label that washes off is not a label.

It also explains why cutting the tag out is a decision with a cost. In year two, when a piece has faded on one side and you want to know whether you can bleach it, the answer was on the tag.

If a tag has to go, photograph it first. It takes five seconds and it is the only copy of that information you will ever have.

There is one federal rule that touches every piece of clothing sold in the country and almost never appears on the tag. It is the flammability standard for clothing textiles, and the reason it does not appear is worth understanding.

The standard sorts fabrics into classes by how fast a flame travels across them in a test. The top class is the one clothing is supposed to be in:

And the bottom class is the one that may not be sold as clothing at all:

So why is there no class printed on your tag? Because the rule is a floor, not a grade. A garment on sale is required to be Class 1 or Class 2, and there is no label for meeting a requirement you were not allowed to fail.

There is a second reason that is directly relevant to this range. The standard exempts certain fabrics from testing altogether, because their behaviour is known:

Polyester and nylon are on that list, and most of the knits in this range are polyester with spandex. That is why the question rarely comes up with everyday clothing, and it is also why the fibre line matters more than people think. It is doing quiet work on more than one front.

What the exemption is not is a promise about a garment. It is a statement about a fibre in a test, and it says nothing about a loose knit near a candle. Loungewear worn around an open flame is a matter of sense rather than of regulation.

Most tags carry a country of origin, and the same textile rules require it. It tells you where the garment was made or processed. It does not tell you where the fibre was grown, where the fabric was woven, or who designed it, and reading more into the line than it says is a common mistake in both directions.

We print what the tag prints and draw no conclusions from it, because the rule does not let us draw any either.

Six lines, and a tag that used to be noise becomes the most useful paragraph on the garment.

Every page in this range carries a fabric line and a features list drawn from the maker's own text, with nothing added. Where the maker states a blend, we print the blend. Where the maker states a wash instruction, we print that. Where the maker says nothing, the line is absent rather than invented.

That is a smaller promise than most clothing pages make, and it is the one we can keep. The sizing guide turns the fibre line into a size, the care guide turns the wash lines into a routine, and this page is the key to both.