Welcome to American Threads, a regular column about the fate and future of American fashion, written by Vogue Business Editor-in-Chief Christina Binkley. To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, Sign up here.
Imagine being able to know what’s in your shirt in the same way you know the ingredients and nutritional content of your mayonnaise. That was the conundrum that plagued British industrial designer Peter Goese during the pandemic.
After his research into ionic liquid solvents was halted by the coronavirus pandemic, Ghose used his free time to develop “Clothing Information” labels, which he modeled after the nutrition facts labels commonly found on packaged foods in many parts of the world.
Even after covering the fashion industry for years, I never would have imagined that the little box printed on a garment’s tag contains information that so many shoppers want and need to know: fiber and chemical content, garment lifespan, microfiber shedding, recycling, fuel sources, textile worker wages, and more.
What Goess has developed is elegant, highly ingenious and deceptively simple: a concise and innovative means of communicating the many facets of garment production.
“I wanted to show people that clothing is a complex product,” Ghose told me recently over a Zoom call.
The method that Ghose applied to clothing swing tags is familiar and easy to understand. But it reveals shocking facts: One sample describes a garment that contains 45 grams of chemicals per 100 grams of fabric, including 112 synthetic chemicals; travels 25,432 miles through the supply chain; sheds 137,951 microfibers per wash; and the textile workers who make the garment earn just 45 percent of the local minimum wage.
Can you show me a shirt with lower mileage, fewer chemicals, and higher wages?
We know that providing information to consumers is a powerful tool to shape consumption. In 1990, the U.S. Congress tasked the Food and Drug Administration with designing new nutrition labels for packaged foods. The agency hired the design firm Greenfield Belser Ltd because one of the company’s founders, Burkey Belser, had previously designed the “EnergyGuide” labels for household appliances.
The Helvetica-font nutrition label, which debuted in 1994, was surrounded by a bold black box that, according to Belser, signaled that the space within represented government branding and that “manufacturers could not infringe on public property.” Soon the label was being promoted to Americans as helping to promote health and reduce health-care costs; two years later, Britain followed suit. Today, most countries have adopted a form of label that Italian designer Massimo Vignelli called a masterpiece of socially responsible “information architecture” in 1996.
