Itchy and Scratchy

I hate woven labels on shirt necks. They itch and scratch and just bug the crap outta me. Kinda like someone poking me with a stick all day. Not a lot of comfort in that.

If I was bothered enough I could always cut out the sewn-in labels and just try to remember which size that favorite shirt was, or which child-labor shirt maker made it so that I could buy the same brand and size the next time if it was a good fit. But once I cut out the label, the scratch was gone.

The apparel industry recently began printing the labels and I thought my karma was rewarding me for, oh, I don’t know, maybe for not stuffing a dead rat in the dryer vent of the assholes who used to live next door, but their karma took perfect care of them. They’re now both dead. Ahem...

The printed size-care-use labels are called Tagless Labels. This fast growing trend began with cheap t-shirts and is now finding its way into many other garments. Garment labeling is a big business. Really, it’s a huge business with more nuances than a thirsty teen with a pacifier at a rave party. There’s the federal regulations to worry about, clothing counterfeiters, label marketing, brand imaging and protection, holographic labeling, and other factors that I had never even thought about. But the industry has, believe me. Just the U.S. government's apparel labeling rules and regulations are enough to wipe out an entire forest of trees for the paper to print them on. Fascinating and troublesome at the same time, but that's for someone else to blog about. I'm mostly just bothered by the torture-like feel of a label on my neck, or at the back of my underwear's waistband. "Chinese water torture" has nothing on the misery of a scratchy label.

Federal regulations require a label to be legible and durable enough that it lasts for the life of the garment, so it's going to be with me for a while. The trouble with tagless is that the ink is sometimes so thick, or made to be so durable that even it scratches me.

But, I don’t see me cutting a hole in the shirt where the printed label is.