The Label You Cut Off

Most garments carry two kinds of text. One hangs from a cord looped through a sleeve or a collar: the swing tag, a piece of printed card that may carry words such as "conscious", "responsible" or "sustainable". The other is sewn into a side seam: a narrow strip listing fibres, a country of manufacture and a row of small symbols for washing, bleaching, drying and ironing. The first is designed to be cut off before the garment is ever worn. The second stays for as long as the garment does.

The difference is easy to overlook, and it is worth a moment. For years the removable text did most of the talking about environmental value, while the permanent text quietly described something arguably more relevant: how the thing is meant to be looked after. In 2026, law in several places is pushing the conversation from the first kind of text towards the second.

A word asked to do everything

"Sustainable" is an elastic word. It can describe a fibre, a factory, a supplier code, a carbon offset or simply a company's intentions, and the shopper is rarely told which. Regulators have reached the same conclusion. When the UK's Competition and Markets Authority published a guide for fashion businesses in September 2024, it warned against "the use of broad terms, such as 'sustainable', which are unclear and so more likely to mislead consumers".

That guide followed an investigation into ASOS, Boohoo and George at Asda. In March 2024 the three retailers gave the CMA formal undertakings that terms such as "eco", "responsible" or "sustainable" would not be used without further explanation, and that products would not be placed in an environmental range unless they met its published criteria. The undertakings were voluntary and involved no admission of wrongdoing. The stakes have since risen. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, whose consumer enforcement regime came into force in April 2025, the CMA can now decide breaches of consumer law itself and impose penalties of up to 10% of a business's global turnover.

The European Union has moved further. Directive (EU) 2024/825, usually called the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, had to be written into national law by 27 March 2026, and its rules apply from 27 September 2026: this autumn. In the European Commission's own summary, companies "will no longer be able to declare that they are 'green' or 'environmentally friendly'" unless they can demonstrate it. Sustainability labels that are not based on a certification scheme or established by a public authority are prohibited, and unfair commercial practices linked to early obsolescence are banned. A second, more detailed proposal, the Green Claims Directive, was meant to set out how explicit claims should be substantiated. It stalled after the Commission announced, on 20 June 2025, that it intended to withdraw it.

Singapore has taken a guidance route rather than new legislation. On 6 October 2025 the Competition and Consumer Commission of Singapore issued a guide on quality-related claims, environmental claims included, under the existing Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act. Its five principles read like a plain-English checklist: claims should be true and accurate, clear and easily understood, meaningful, accompanied by material information, and supportable by evidence. The commission's earlier study of online marketing had found that more than half of the product claims it examined were "vague with insufficient elaboration or details".

What these regimes share is less a ban on talking about the environment than a demand for specificity. "Made with 70% recycled polyester" can be checked. "Sustainable" cannot, because it does not say what is being sustained, or for how long.

The stock that was never worn

There is a second document that tells us more than any swing tag. In its annual report for the year to March 2018, Burberry stated that "the cost of finished goods physically destroyed in the year was £28.6 million". The figure, which included perfume and beauty products as well as clothing, caused an outcry, and in September 2018 the company said it would stop destroying products it could not sell and would reuse, repair, donate or recycle them instead.

The disclosure was unusual mainly for its candour. According to estimates from the European Environment Agency, cited by the Commission, between 4% and 9% of textile products placed on the European market are destroyed before they are used, roughly 264,000 to 594,000 tonnes a year. France banned the destruction of unsold non-food goods under its anti-waste law, with the rule taking effect for textiles on 1 January 2022.

Europe now goes further. Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which entered into force in July 2024, large companies have been banned since 19 July 2026 from destroying unsold apparel, clothing accessories and footwear. Medium-sized companies follow in 2030. Exceptions exist, for goods that are unsafe or damaged, counterfeit, or refused by charities, among others, but companies relying on them must keep evidence and publish annual reports on what they discard. The Commission has also named textiles, with a focus on apparel, as a priority product group for future ecodesign rules, with a delegated act on textiles currently planned for the fourth quarter of 2027.

It is worth pausing on what this means. A garment destroyed unworn has a durability of zero, regardless of how responsibly its fibre was farmed. The most carefully certified cotton is wasted if the shirt goes from warehouse to incinerator. The law has, in effect, recognised that use is part of value.

Measuring by the year, not the label

If the question is what makes clothing less wasteful, the clearest evidence points not to a word on a tag but to time. WRAP, the UK waste charity, has estimated that extending the life of clothing by nine months can reduce its carbon, water and waste footprints by around 20%. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, looking at the global picture, reports that clothing production has approximately doubled over 15 years while clothing use, the number of times a garment is worn, has declined by almost 40%. In its words, "every second one truckload of clothing is landfilled or burned."

Europe's next step formalises this. The revised Waste Framework Directive, in force since 16 October 2025, gives member states 30 months to set up extended producer responsibility schemes for textiles and footwear. Producers will pay fees for the products they place on the market, and those fees will be adjusted according to sustainability criteria such as durability and recyclability. For the first time, how long something is likely to last becomes a line in a producer's costs rather than a line in its marketing.

Repair, too, is being treated as infrastructure. In France, Refashion, the industry body responsible for textile producer responsibility, runs a repair bonus that offers an immediate discount of between 6 and 25 euros on the mending of clothes and shoes through approved repairers.

None of this is new as an idea. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a Dutch darning sampler from 1797, silk embroidered on cotton, which the museum's description says likely belonged to a teacher at a school for orphans in Amsterdam. Its contrasting threads were chosen so that each mending technique would be visible. The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that Dutch needleworkers of the later 1700s made elaborate darning samplers to show off their skill. Repair was once something to be taught, practised and displayed, not hidden.

What a designer piece is for

For someone who buys designer fashion, this shift is less a burden than a clarification. The usual case for paying more has always rested, at least in part, on longevity: better cloth, better construction, a design that does not date by next season. The new rules make that case testable rather than rhetorical. A brand can be asked how long a coat is built to last, whether spare buttons and repair are offered, and whether its claims would survive a regulator's question.

What follows is an interpretation rather than a finding. A more honest measure of a garment's environmental worth may be the number of years it is kept and worn, multiplied by how easily it can be mended along the way. That figure appears on no label. It is written instead by the person who owns the piece, through care, alteration and the decision not to replace it.

Which returns us to the two kinds of text. The swing tag makes a promise and is thrown away. The care label gives instructions and stays. If the question is what makes something truly valuable, the second is the better place to start reading.

Sources

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Lead image: Darning sampler, Dutch, 1797. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Mabel Herbert Harper, 1957, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.