Naomi Potter makes clothes without scratchy labels; scientists shrug
Our six-year review of shirt tags lands the same week Naomi Potter's sensory-friendly clothing line gets a BBC feature, which we rate as fine.
"...so we asked the manufacturers who had worn the label first, and the room went quiet," Dr Petra Voidwell told reporters on Thursday. "That is when we knew."
We looked at six thousand neck labels. A neck label is the small square of plastic sewn into a collar to tell you how to wash it. Not one had touched a neck before it reached a shop.
We used a control group. A control group is a pile of shirts we did nothing to, so we can tell whether we did anything. The control shirts also scratched. We take this to mean the problem is not us.
The result is very unlikely to be chance. We put the odds at less than one in six hundred. Every person in this country has spent their life inside clothes that nobody tried on. The itch at the back of your collar is the sound of the system failing. We have written to the government. We have not heard back.
Separately, one small company has made clothes without the scratchy bits. Naomi Potter set it up after some fabrics felt like too much to wear. We watched the piece. It solves the problem. We have filed it under "sensible" and moved on.
The industry asked for more time. We gave it six years. It used them to make the label bigger.
