Start with the label you already have on
Most people can name the fabric of their shirt and not their underwear. The tag is right there. Here is how to read it.
The tag is usually in the waistband, sometimes in a side seam, and increasingly printed straight onto the fabric so there is nothing to scratch. Wherever it is, it has to tell you what the garment is made of. Composition is listed by weight, highest first.
So 95% Polyester, 5% Elastane means that ninety-five percent of that garment’s weight is plastic. Not plastic-like. Plastic.
The words that hide it
Very little of this is stated plainly on the front of the packet. The vocabulary does a lot of work:
- Microfibre — polyester or polyamide, spun very fine. Still plastic.
- Performance, tech, active — almost always synthetic.
- Moisture-wicking — a property of synthetics, and often a chemical finish applied on top.
- Modal, viscose, bamboo — regenerated cellulose. Plant-derived, but heavily chemically processed. Not plastic, and not cotton either.
If cotton is not listed first, it is not a cotton garment, whatever the front of the packet says.
The carve-out worth knowing
Look for the phrase exclusive of waistband, or exclusive of trims, or exclusive of decoration. It means the stated composition legally excludes those parts. It is a real and permitted carve-out, and it is also where a lot of quiet rounding-up lives.
A garment labelled simply 100% cotton that has a stretchy band is telling you something less complete than one labelled 100% cotton, exclusive of waistband. The second one is being more careful with you, not less.
We use that phrase. Here is exactly what it covers.
The body of ours is 100% organic cotton. The waistband contains elastic, because a waistband with no elastic does not stay up, and there is currently no cotton-only elastic that performs over months of wear and washing. We could leave the caveat off and most people would never check. We would rather print it and explain it. If a band turns up that meets the standard, we will change it, and we will say so here.
The whole exercise
Open a drawer. Read three labels. That is it. Most people are genuinely surprised, not because the information was hidden, but because nobody has ever had a reason to look.