Show me the ingredients: The story behind fashion’s first nutrition label | Vogue Business

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Welcome to The American Thread, a recurring column on the fate and future of fashion in the US, written by Vogue Business editor-at-large Christina Binkley. To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.

Imagine knowing what’s in your shirt the way one knows the ingredients and nutritional content of mayonnaise. That was the puzzle that engaged a British industrial designer named Peter Gorse during the pandemic.

After his work studying ionic liquid solvents was sidelined by Covid, Gorse used his downtime to develop a ‘garment facts’ label. He fashioned it on the nutrition facts labels that are ubiquitous on packaged food throughout much of the world.

Many years of covering the fashion industry did not prepare me for what a small box printed on an apparel swing tag could convey — information about fibre and chemical content, garment life, microfibre shedding, recycling, fuel sources and textile worker pay, that many shoppers want to know and should know about.

What Gorse has developed is elegant, a whole lot of genius, and deceptively simple: a succinct, innovative means of communicating much of what goes into producing clothing. It would be helpful if the European Union would take note and consider adopting more informative consumer labelling with hangtags as they implement regulations to combat greenwashing this year.

“I wanted to convey to people that clothes are complex products,” Gorse told me recently on a Zoom call.

Gorse’s adaptation for clothing swing tags looks familiar and easy to digest. Then come the shocks. One sample describes a garment with 45 grams of chemicals per 100 grams of fabric, which contains 112 synthetic chemicals; the garment travelled 25,432 miles through its supply chain and will shed 137,951 microfibres per wash; and its textile workers earned 45 per cent of the local living wage.

May I please see a shirt with less mileage, fewer chemicals and better pay?

We know that providing consumers with information is a powerful way to shape consumption. The US Congress in 1990 mandated that the Food & Drug Administration design a new nutrition label for packaged foods. The agency hired design firm Greenfield Belser Ltd because one of its founders, Burkey Belser, had designed the successful ‘EnergyGuide’ labels for appliances.

The iconic Helvetica-font nutrition facts label that emerged in 1994 was surrounded by a bold black box that signalled, according to Belser, that the space within it was equivalent to a government brand and that “manufacturers could not encroach on public property”. An ad blitz soon told Americans that the label would help encourage healthier choices while lowering healthcare costs. Two years later, the UK followed suit. Most nations now carry a form of the labels, which Italian designer Massimo Vignelli in 1996 called a masterpiece of socially responsible “information architecture”.

Food manufacturers were soon reformulating products to reduce saturated fats and sodium, alongside increasing healthier content such as fibre.

We take for granted today our ability to know the sugar volume in a serving of whipped cream. Shouldn’t we also know what’s in our clothing, without hiring a private chemist?

Gorse announced his garment facts labels on LinkedIn. “I thought some of my friends would see it,” he says. He was quickly astounded by the flood of responses, including one from an impact-measurement consulting group, and another from a multi-brand apparel manufacturer promising funding.

Then, Gorse made a rookie mistake. When the apparel manufacturer demanded an exclusive to fund the label in 2023, he agreed and shut down discussions with other entities. “I naively agreed to that and I stopped talking to anyone else,” Gorse says.

Within a year it became clear that Gorse’s aims and those of the brand’s were at odds, he says. “Potentially I put them off because I wanted to do a credible label,” he says. “Don’t say the word ‘chemicals’. Don’t say ‘wages’. Don’t say ‘microfibres’.” A year ago, the company pulled out of the agreement, leaving the garment facts label at square one.

Gorse is now back talking to other potential investors, including a “large European brand that asked for a proposal”, he says, declining to name the brand for fear of losing another possible backer.

Gorse may be looking for support in the wrong places. Food nutrition and appliance energy-use data is provided by manufacturers because governments demand it for the good of all citizens. The labels are useful because the data is universal and uniform, and not determined by a company’s branding strategy. It is legislators and government agencies who should be adopting this label, just as they did nutrition facts.

I learnt of Gorse’s label from Sal Giardina, a textile development and marketing professor at America’s Fashion Institution of Technology, who has a strong interest in sustainability and has been having his students use the label in their final projects. Giardina is hoping the garment facts label will be adopted broadly.

Garment facts could change the way we choose clothing, as well as how much we are willing to pay for it. Most consumers are wary of greenwashing these days, so having universal measurements — even if imperfect — would help us shoppers make smarter decisions for ourselves and the planet.

There is a near-universal agreement that the globe is engorged with apparel. It’s washing up on beaches, clogging blood, semen and mother’s milk with microfibres, its chemicals absorbed by our skin and inhaled by our respiratory tracts.

Consumers can know whether their food contains Yellow #5, an artificial food dye linked to hives and asthma, because of labelling requirements. Shouldn’t we know about the hundreds of chemicals used to texturise, unwrinkle and colour our fabrics?

We know the number of servings in a box of pretzels. Shouldn’t we know how many wears we can expect from a cardigan?

I ran some of this by Andrea Ferris, co-founder of Ciclo Textiles, a California company with a technology that helps polyester biodegrade, rather than shed off into tonnes of microfibres. She questioned how accurate garment facts data could be. “It’s difficult to measure how much microfibre is shed,” she says. “I do think it’s too technical to share with consumers.”

Yet Gorse’s garment facts label is more refined. It is both complex and simple, boiling down an apparel chain that spans 16,000 chemicals used in plastic or polyester, an estimated 75 million garment workers, the recycling chain, energy use and microfibre shedding.

Gorse doesn’t pretend his label is perfect, and we shouldn’t wait for perfection to press for details on the contents and manufacturing of our clothing. He carefully researched sources, rejecting maligned and hard-to-quantify data like carbon footprint and water use. “Where do you start and where do you finish? Do you measure the water used to get the gas out of the ground?” he asks.

“I wanted it to reflect the entire garment,” Gorse says. “You’ve got all these images of the skill and the craft of clothes, but it’s a good example of a product that has an Achilles heel.”

Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at [email protected].

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