How to Read a Clothing Label

The tag is telling you three things

In the US, a clothing label has to carry three pieces of information. This has been the law since 1960, under something called the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act.

What the fibers are, with percentages. Where it was made. And who's responsible for it, either a company name or a number.

That's it. Everything else on the tag is the brand talking.

The percentages are in order, and that matters

Fibers get listed from most to least by weight. So a tag reading 60% cotton, 40% polyester is mostly cotton. A tag reading 40% cotton, 60% polyester is mostly plastic, and it'll feel like it by August.

People skim the first word and stop. The first word is only the biggest share, not the whole story.

Anything under 5% can hide

Here's the part almost nobody knows. Fibers making up less than 5% of the weight don't have to be named at all. They can just be listed as "other fiber."

There are two exceptions worth remembering. Wool always has to be named no matter how small the amount. And a fiber under 5% can be named if it's doing a real job, which is why you'll see 2% spandex spelled out. It's there for stretch, so they tell you.

"Wool" has a legal definition, and it's broader than sheep

Wool on a label means fiber from a sheep or lamb, but it also legally covers Angora goat, which is where mohair comes from, plus cashmere goat, camel, alpaca, llama, and vicuña. So a tag that says wool isn't always sheep.

Two things to watch for. "Recycled wool" is wool that was already a garment once and got broken back down to fiber. It's not a lesser thing necessarily, but it has to say so, and it usually feels different.

And cashmere has real standards behind it. To be called cashmere in the US, the fibers have to average 19 microns or finer, with no more than 3% of them thicker than 30 microns. That's why a genuine cashmere piece feels like nothing on your neck and a cheap "cashmere blend" scratches.

The red White + Warren cardigan in the shop right now is 100% cashmere, and the tag says so plainly. Those are the easy ones.

What the tag will never tell you

Fiber content is not quality. 100% wool covers a beautifully woven coat that'll outlive you and a thin scratchy sweater that pilled in its first winter.

What the tag can't measure is weight, weave, and how it was put together. Pick two wool blazers up and one of them will feel like it has bones in it. That's the one. The Anne Klein tweed coat and the Jones New York trousers both have that heft, and no label communicates it. You have to hold the thing.

The RN number is a free lookup nobody uses

That number on the tag starting with RN is a Registered Identification Number. The FTC hands them out to US companies as a shorter way to say who they are, and the database is public and free at ftc.gov/rn-database/search. Type in the number and you get the company.

It's useful for two things. Finding out who actually made something when the brand name means nothing to you, and getting a rough sense of age. RN numbers from 13670 up were issued starting in 1959, so a low number means an older registration.

But be careful with that second one. A company keeps its RN number forever. So the number tells you the earliest a piece could have been made, not when it was. A shirt with a 1960s RN might have been sewn in 1994. I use it as one clue among several, never on its own.

You may also see WPL numbers on older wool pieces. The FTC stopped issuing new ones, but companies that already had them can still use them.

When there's no tag at all

This happens constantly with vintage, and it's the reason I wrote this. Fiber content labeling only became law in 1960, so plenty of genuinely old pieces never had one. Care instructions came later still, in the early seventies. And on top of that, people cut tags out because they itch.

The black suede beaded slip dress in the shop has no label whatsoever. Somebody removed it decades ago. So you go by hand instead.

The burn test, for when you already own it

This is the one that actually settles it, and obviously you can't do it in a store. It's for after you get something home and want to know.

Pull one thread from an inside seam allowance where nobody will ever see it. Hold it with tweezers over the sink and light the end. One thread, nothing bigger. Then watch what it does.

Cotton and linen catch fast, smell like burning paper, keep glowing after the flame is out, and leave a soft grey ash you can rub away to nothing.

Wool and silk are slow. They sizzle, put themselves out, and smell unmistakably like burning hair. The residue is gritty and crushes into a dark powder.

Polyester melts rather than burns, smells faintly sweet and chemical, and leaves a hard black bead you can feel with a fingernail. Nylon does the same but the smell is closer to celery. If you end up with a bead, it's a synthetic, and no amount of hoping will change that.

Why I bother with any of this

Because natural fibers are most of what I'll buy for the shop. Wool, linen, cotton, silk, cashmere, leather. They breathe, they take a wash, they get better looking as they age instead of worse. A wool coat from 1972 is still a wool coat. A polyester blouse from 2019 is already pilled at the underarms.

Everything in the clothing section here got checked before it came in, tag or no tag. When I know the fiber, the listing says the fiber. When there's no label and I'm going on feel, I say that too.

But I'm not rigid about it, and I'd rather you weren't either. If a coat is 97% wool and 3% something the tag won't name, and it's beautiful and it's clearly built to last, it comes home with me. A little nylon in a seam thread never ruined anything. Plenty of well-made pieces have some small amount of something in them, and throwing those back would be its own kind of waste.

The question was never whether a garment is pure. It's whether it'll still be good in twenty years.

Most of the clothing isn't on the website

Worth saying, given you're reading this on the website. What's listed online is a fraction of what's actually hanging on the rack.

Every piece is one of a kind, so every piece needs its own photographs, its own measurements and its own description before it can go up. That takes longer than selling it does. A good wool coat usually finds someone in the shop before I've gotten around to photographing it.

So if you're after something specific, a size, a fiber, a particular kind of coat, ask me. Or come look at the rack. From September 1st it's at 1139 Post Road in Fairfield.