What a fibre label is allowed not to tell you
The label sewn into the side seam of a garment is a legal document, and almost nobody reads it. In the United States the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act requires it to give the generic name and percentage by weight of each fibre present at five per cent or more, in order of predominance, and those percentages have to be true. Fibres below five per cent are designated simply as "other fiber" unless they serve a definite function, which is the exception that lets a four per cent elastane be named. That sounds like a strong guarantee. It is a narrower one than it looks, because the word carrying the weight is main.
Sewing thread is not the main material. Neither is the elastic in a waistband, the ribbing at a cuff, the interfacing inside a collar, nor the woven label making the claim. All of them are excluded. A t-shirt can be labelled one hundred per cent cotton, truthfully and lawfully, and still be stitched together with polyester thread. Most of them are, because polyester thread is cheaper, stronger and more forgiving on an industrial machine.
We are not raising this to accuse anyone. It is genuinely difficult to source cotton thread at production volume, and a brand using polyester thread is not lying to you. But it does mean the number on the label answers a narrower question than the one you were asking. You wanted to know what you are wearing. The label told you what the fabric is.
What we print instead
On every Apolyth product page there is a specification block with the composition and the care instructions, and the cloth weight wherever we have measured it. It is there before you buy rather than in the parcel afterwards. Where a claim has an edge, we write the edge into the page.
It is not complete, and saying so is part of the point. Decoration method and country of make are not yet published for every garment, because we would rather leave a field empty than fill it with something we have not verified. They are being added as we confirm them.
The fitted tees are ninety-six per cent cotton and four per cent elastane. The elastane is synthetic. It is there for recovery, so the garment returns to its shape instead of bagging at the elbows and seat after a day of wear, and we would rather name it than let you discover it. The winged tee is modal with five per cent elastane. Modal is regenerated cellulose spun from wood pulp, which is manufactured but is not a petrochemical plastic, and that distinction is why it sits inside a standard that excludes polyester.
A standard you only state when it flatters you is not a standard. It is marketing.
The other number worth learning
Cloth weight is the most useful figure on a spec sheet and the one least often explained. It is measured in grams per square metre. A tee at 140gsm is a summer weight that will drape close and show what is underneath it. At 220gsm you have something opaque that holds a shoulder line. At 360gsm, which is what the washed jogger is cut from, you are holding cloth closer to a sweatshirt than to a t-shirt, heavy enough that it hangs rather than clings.
Higher is not better. Weight is a description, not a grade. A heavy cloth can be badly spun and a light one beautifully made, and gsm tells you nothing about fibre length, yarn twist or finishing. What it does tell you, more reliably than any adjective we could write, is how the garment will feel when it arrives and how it will behave after fifty washes.
None of this is proprietary. Any brand could publish it, and we would rather more of them did. The reason we do is simple: these are the facts you would need to judge whether the price is fair, and withholding them is the easiest way to make a garment seem like more than it is. We would rather you knew exactly what you were buying and decided it was worth it.
Sources
Everything above that is a claim about the world rather than about us is checkable here. If we have got something wrong, we would like to know.
- FTC, Threading Your Way Through the Labeling Requirements Under the Textile and Wool Acts
- 16 CFR Part 303, Rules and Regulations Under the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act the five per cent threshold and the functional-significance exception are in §303.3.