A composition tag is the shortest honest description of a garment you will ever get. It tells you how a piece will feel on day one, how it will behave after ten washes, and whether it will still hold its shape at the end of a season. Most people skip straight past it. Here is how to read one in about five seconds.
Cotton
Soft, breathable, and easy against skin. Cotton takes dye well and gets more comfortable with age. It also wrinkles, dries slowly, and can shrink slightly the first time it meets hot water. In a loose knit it will stretch at the elbows and knees and stay that way.
Worth it for: tees, shirting, warm-weather trousers, anything worn directly against skin for long hours.
Polyester
It has an unfair reputation built on the polyester of forty years ago. Modern fine-filament polyester holds color through repeated washing, resists wrinkles, dries quickly, and keeps a pressed line in a way cotton never will. The trade-off is breathability. It traps heat, and it holds odor longer than natural fibers do.
Worth it for: outerwear shells, travel clothing, structured pieces that need to keep their shape, anything you want to pack without ironing.
Wool
Warm for its weight, naturally odor-resistant, and better at regulating temperature than any synthetic. Merino is the fine, soft end of the range and sits comfortably against skin. Coarser wools are warmer and more durable but scratchier. Most coats marked “wool blend” run somewhere between 30 and 60 percent wool, with polyester making up the rest for structure and cost.
A higher wool percentage is not automatically better. A 40 percent wool coat with a dense weave often outlasts a loosely woven 70 percent one. Weight and construction matter as much as the number.
Viscose, rayon, modal and Tencel
These are all plant-derived semi-synthetics, and for practical purposes they behave alike. They drape beautifully, feel cool and fluid, and cost far less than silk. They are also weak when wet, which is why so many of them say hand wash or dry clean. Treat them gently and they last. Wring them out and they will not.
Worth it for: flowing trousers, dresses, anything where movement and drape are the point.
Linen
The coolest fiber there is in real heat, and the most honest about it. Linen wrinkles. That is not a defect, it is the fabric. Pieces cut in linen or linen-cotton blends are built for the days when nothing else works.
Elastane, spandex, Lycra
Same fiber, different trade names. You will usually see 2 to 5 percent, and that small number does more for fit than anything else on the label. It gives a garment recovery, meaning it returns to shape instead of bagging out at the knee by lunchtime. Above about 8 percent you are into activewear territory.
How to read a blend
Fibers are listed by weight, highest first. The first one tells you most of what you need to know.
- 95% cotton, 5% elastane: feels like cotton, fits better, holds shape longer.
- 65% polyester, 35% cotton: a workhorse. Wrinkle-resistant and durable, breathes less than pure cotton.
- 50% wool, 50% polyester: a coat that keeps its line and costs a fraction of full wool. Slightly less warm, considerably more forgiving.
- 100% viscose: gorgeous drape, careful washing.
Weight is the number nobody mentions
Two shirts can share an identical composition tag and wear nothing alike. A 140 gsm cotton tee is a summer layer you can see daylight through. A 240 gsm cotton tee holds its own shape, sits away from the body, and reads as a real garment rather than an undershirt. When weight is listed, it tells you more than the fiber does.
Putting it to use
If you want a piece that survives heavy rotation and a hot dryer, look for cotton-poly with a little elastane. If you want a coat that holds a sharp line through a whole winter, look for a wool blend with real weight behind it, like the Longbridge Trench Coat. If you want something that moves with you and photographs well, viscose and its relatives are doing that job in pieces like the Horizon Wide Leg Pants.
We list composition on product pages wherever we have it confirmed from the source. Where we do not, we leave it blank rather than guess, because a made-up fiber content is worse than none at all.
Once you know what a piece is made of, the next question is how to keep it that way. Our guide to keeping knitwear from pilling, stretching and shrinking covers the half of that battle most people lose in the wash.
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