Should we prepare to say goodbye to clothing labels? An American trade association would like it to be so

There has been a lot of discussion in recent days about a proposal put forward by the American Apparel & Footwear Association to the U.S. Congress concerning the future of the inner labels on garments - to be clear, not the ones bearing the brand name but the ones usually placed on the side that include, precisely, the composition, washing instructions and other useful information that includes indications about the origin, sustainability of the garments and so on. The main problem, according to the paper, would be that these labels have come to include so much information that they look like pamphlets and present, for manufacturers, problems regarding the language of the labels: if this has to be changed according to the sales market, there is extra work for manufacturers; if, on the other hand, the label is multilingual, its size becomes excessive. Another thing Alden Wicker notes in the pages of BoF, founder of the website Ecocult and an independent fashion and sustainability journalist, is that the habit developed by consumers is to cut away these labels turning all the effort of brands into waste. Answer to this problem, according to the association, would be the conversion to digital tags, which through a QR Code or other form of code could allow consumers to access web pages that conveniently include all the information, in a readable and extended way. The proposal does not actually seem excessive, yet if it were to come to fruition it could have important consequences for the production, tracking, and resale of clothing. But is it a feasible project?

The digital garment ID solution, however, has undoubted advantages-nominally the amount of information that can be included on a garment, the complete traceability of all materials that would not have to be entrusted to codes and acronyms that are difficult to replicate, and also the immediacy in finding that information. Perhaps tomorrow we really will have to get used to all-digital tags, but until then the most reasonable compromise remains a more concise physical tag, perhaps with washing instructions and composition, which then entrusts the rest of the information to a QR Code.