What a clothing label has to tell you, and what it does not

Buying clothing by the pack means buying it without the tag in your hand. You get a photograph, a title written for a search box, and a few lines of description. The tag arrives later, and by then the decision is made.

That is worth knowing precisely because the tag is where the enforceable statements live. Two Federal Trade Commission rules govern it. One is about washing, the other is about fibre. Neither one covers fit, durability, thickness or whether the colour will run onto a white sheet, and every argument about an online description happens in the gap between what the rules require and what a buyer wants to know.

This guide covers both rules, then what they leave open, using the 857 pack lines on our own shelf as the worked example.

Part 423 of Title 16 is the Care Labeling Rule. It starts by defining what a care label is, and the definition is stricter than the object most people picture:

Permanent, attached, and legible for the life of the garment. A sticker is not a care label. A card in the box is not a care label. The washed-out ghost of printing on a tag that has been through forty cycles is, arguably, no longer one.

The rule then lists what counts as an unfair or deceptive practice, and the list reads as a set of duties. The first is the plain one:

Prior to sale. That phrase is doing a lot of quiet work in a world where most clothing is bought from a photograph, and it is the reason a well-written product page repeats the washing instruction in its text.

The third duty is the one that protects the rest of your wash:

Others being cleaned with it. That is dye transfer, and it is the single most common complaint about cheap coloured textiles. A maker who knows a deep red will bleed is supposed to say so.

And the last duty is the one that stops a label being a guess:

Section 423.6 says a label for textile wearing apparel must carry either a washing instruction or a drycleaning instruction. One of the two is enough if either method works. Ironing gets a mention only when it is needed regularly, and a temperature has to come with it unless a hot iron does no harm.

The clause people never expect is the one that covers the object that cannot be cleaned at all:

That sentence exists because some things genuinely cannot be cleaned, and the rule would rather have a label say so than have it invent a method. It is also a useful test to apply to a description: a page that dodges the cleaning question entirely is a page nobody thought hard about.

Symbols are allowed alongside words. The rule is deliberately relaxed about vocabulary:

So one tag says machine wash cold, the next says wash in cold water, and both are fine.

The second rule governs fibre names, and it exists because trade names are older than honesty. Part 303 requires that a maker's own name for a fibre never travel alone:

Equal size and conspicuousness. That is the clause that stops a brand printing its invented fibre name in bold and the word polyester in grey four-point type underneath.

The catch-all at the end of the section is broader still:

Read those two together and a familiar species of product name loses its cover. Ice silk is not a fibre. Milk fibre, bamboo charcoal and cooling nylon are marketing compounds, and behind each of them there is a generic name that has to appear.

We run into this constantly, because we sell what makers list. Where a maker names a fibre, our page repeats that word and nothing else. Here is the whole shelf counted by the material word the maker used.

The gap at the bottom of that table is the honest part. A large number of lines name no material at all, and rather than guess from a photograph we leave the field off the page.

A catalogue like this one runs on a short list. Learn five words and you have covered most of what arrives.

• Cotton. Absorbent, takes a hot wash, shrinks a little the first time and then stops. The right answer for anything against skin all day and the wrong one for anything that has to dry overnight.
• Polyester. Holds shape and colour through repeated washing, dries fast, does not absorb. The default for things bought in quantity, and the reason a cheap pack still looks the same after twenty washes.
• Nylon. Stronger than polyester at the same weight and brighter in deep colours. Melts rather than chars, so it stays away from a hot iron.
• Spandex, elastane or Lycra. Never the whole fabric, always the five to ten percent that makes it stretch. It is also the part that dies first, and that is why an old sock goes loose rather than wearing through.
• Acrylic. The knitwear fibre that behaves like wool and costs less. Warm, light, pills sooner, and does not itch the people wool bothers.

Two more turn up often enough to name. Rayon and viscose are the same thing under different words, made from processed wood pulp, soft and weak when wet. Silk is real silk when the label says so, and the word carries a legal meaning under the fibre rule rather than a poetic one.

Anything else you read on a front-of-pack, ice silk, milk fibre, cooling nylon, bamboo charcoal, is a trade name with one of the above sitting behind it.

Symbols are optional in the United States and near universal on goods made for several markets at once. Five of them decide almost everything.

• The tub. Washing. A number inside it is the maximum temperature in Celsius. A hand in it means hand wash. A cross through it means do not wash at all.
• The triangle. Bleach. Empty means any bleach, two diagonal lines means oxygen bleach only, crossed out means none.
• The square. Drying. A circle inside it is a tumble dryer, dots inside the circle are heat, a horizontal line inside the square means dry flat.
• The iron. Dots are temperature, one to three. A cross means the fabric will melt or glaze, and on nylon that is not a suggestion.
• The circle. Professional cleaning. Letters inside it are for the cleaner, not for you.

The useful habit is to read the crossed-out ones first. What a label forbids is more informative than what it permits, because a maker only forbids something after it has gone wrong.

No rule covers sizing, and multipacks are where that gap hurts most. A pack of six in one size is six chances to be wrong rather than one.

One size fits most is a claim about elastic, not about people. On a head cover it usually holds, because a gathered edge stretches a long way. On a glove it holds for hands within about an inch of average and fails outside that. On anything with a fixed circumference, a bralette band or a boot cuff, it does not hold at all, and the maker who prints it there is hoping.

Where a maker states measurements, we print them. Where a maker states only a letter, we print the letter and nothing more, because converting somebody else's medium into inches would be our guess dressed as a fact.

The practical move on a multipack is to buy the small pack first. Three to nine is enough to learn whether a maker runs generous or mean, and the case pack is a much better idea afterwards.

This is the useful half of the guide, because it is where buying by the pack goes wrong.

• Fit and sizing. No federal rule sets what a medium is. Two packs of the same fibre from two makers will differ by an inch and both are correct.
• Weight and opacity. Nothing on a tag tells you a camisole is see-through in daylight. Fibre does not settle it, because the same fibre is spun at a dozen weights.
• Durability. No rule requires a claim about how many washes something survives, so almost nobody makes one.
• Shrinkage. Only relevant to natural fibres, and only disclosed when the maker chooses to.
• Colourfastness beyond the warning duty. The care rule asks for a warning where a known procedure would harm other items. It does not require testing to find out.

None of that is a scandal. It is a division of labour: the rules cover what can be defined precisely, and everything else is a judgement made by whoever is selling. Our judgement is to print the count, the material word and the price per piece, and to keep quiet where the maker was quiet.

Fibre is not evenly spread across a catalogue like this one. Head covers skew to satin and polyester because both are smooth against skin and cheap to cut. Legwear skews to cotton blends because feet sweat. Party goods barely mention fibre at all, because most of them are paper and plastic and the care rule does not reach them.

Two things fall out of that table. The first is that the departments with the highest disclosure rate are the ones where the item touches skin for hours, which is roughly the order in which a buyer would want disclosure anyway. The second is that party and classroom goods sit near the bottom, and that is the care rule working as designed rather than a supplier being cagey. A paper favour bag is not textile wearing apparel.

Four habits, in the order they save money.

1. Look for the generic fibre word. If a page names a fabric and no generic name appears anywhere near it, treat the fabric name as decoration.
2. Look for a washing instruction in the text. Its presence says somebody read the tag before writing the page. Its absence says nothing good.
3. Treat weight claims as unverifiable unless a number follows. Thick, warm and premium are opinions. Grams per square metre is a fact.
4. Divide. When two packs of the same fibre differ in price, work out the per-piece figure before deciding one is dearer. On our pages that division is already done for you.

The last one is the reason this site prints two numbers under everything rather than one. Fibre content and washing are the two facts a rule guarantees you. Everything else, including whether the pack is good value, is arithmetic somebody has to do.

One person buying one thing can return it. A nursery buying twenty of something cannot, and that changes which facts matter.

Wash temperature moves to the top of the list. Anything that will be worn by children, worn in a clinic or worn in a kitchen goes through a hot wash whether the label likes it or not, and a pack that says cold wash only is a pack that will come back shrunk. Cotton and polyester both survive sixty degrees. Elastane above forty starts giving up, and that is what turns a fitted cap into a loose one.

Colour comes second, and for the same reason. Deep reds, navies and blacks are the ones that bleed, and a group order means twenty of them in one machine. Wash the first load alone and you will know within an hour.

Third is the seam. Look at the photograph of the inside if there is one. An overlocked edge holds through a hundred washes. A single line of stitching along a raw edge does not, and on a group order that failure shows up in month three across every item at once, because they all went in together.

Fourth, and this is the one people skip: buy one pack, wash it four times, then buy the rest. A month of patience costs less than twenty items nobody wants to wear.

None of these are forbidden. All of them are unregulated, which means they carry whatever the person writing the page wanted them to carry.

• Breathable. No test behind it. Sometimes true, always unmeasured.
• Moisture wicking. Describes what a synthetic fibre does by nature. Printing it is not a claim so much as a description of polyester.
• Antibacterial. Where a treatment is registered, the maker usually names it, because naming it is the point. Where nothing is named, treat the word as decoration.
• Cooling. Almost always means smooth and thin. A fabric cannot lower the temperature of a room.
• Premium. An adjective with no referent.
• Seamless. Real on knitted goods made on a circular machine, and printed on plenty of things with seams.

The test we use before putting a word on one of our pages is simple: could somebody check it. Fibre content can be checked. Wash temperature can be checked. Breathable cannot, so it stays off.

• A care label must be permanent, attached and legible for the life of the item, and the instructions have to be disclosed before the sale, not after it.
• If nothing can clean the thing, the label has to say that too.
• A maker's fibre trade name never travels alone: the generic name goes beside it in type of equal size and conspicuousness.
• Neither rule covers fit, opacity, durability or shrinkage. Those are judgement calls, and a good product page makes them out loud.
• Where a maker names nothing, the honest page says nothing.