Labels and their Claws

From Work in Progress: Sligeach

The first thing I do when I buy an item of clothing is to cut out the label. You have to remove it right down to the seam, which is very difficult. Usually there’s a piece of label left, its edges frayed by the snip of the scissors. A little remnant ridge of material, pressing into the same patch of skin. The back of the neck. The side of the torso. A little remnant ridge of nylon. This severed and irregular remnant can be worse than the original label. Severed and irregular. That’s why you actually have to unpick the label, carefully, even when the temptation is to rip it out and shout fuck off.. I have, in fact, a special tiny tool with a forked tip and a tiny blade, I can’t remember the name. Doubtless something self-explanatory like a seam-picker. My mother gave it to me. She no longer sows. No longer able to sow. This is what I use to remove the label, at the root, as it were. I somehow feel that if I do not remove it at the root, it will grow back, resentful at having been mutilated, digging its maimed nails into my sensitive flesh all the more desperately.

Doubtless there is some way in which labels, or rather the information on labels, could be embedded somehow in the clothing without being part of a separate tag or even a raised rectangle of material. No doubt manufacturers could find a way to do this. Instead, rather than the clothing becoming wholly yours, here’s the manufacturer or brand owner inserting his annoying little label into your neck or side or the small of your back, chaffing your body with the supernumerary little label with sizes and washing instructions. Why can’t this information, actually, come in a separate little packet. The clothes, unlabelled on the one hand, and, on the other, a small packet with sizes, washing instructions, brand logos. Or a barcode you can scan, and keep the info on your phone. Perfect. All the information on your phone. Instead, something which is not part of your clothing, a kind of growth or abnormality, destroys, for example, the snuggly comfort of a jumper, the soft kind warmth of a jumper interrupted and destroyed by a nylon or even cotton label; likewise, the snug cotton pants. Stiff and scratchy at the top of your arse. Scratchy, stiff and stubborn. Whilst you’re walking, or bending down to wash your hands, there’s the label scratching and even squeaking. So stiff and scratchy.

For me. Stiff and scratchy for me, for of course I’m very much aware that there are plenty of people unbothered by labels. It’s difficult for me to understand these people, its baffling to me how people put up with these labels rubbing against their flesh. Not only the physical sensation, but the fact of a label which is no part of the design of your clothing, but an annoying add-on which reminds you of your own body, yes, sore and itchy, but also of the clothes as a manufactured piece of material, the distant and doubtless dismal factory itself and the whole machinery of production, and the brand of course, the label bearing the mark of the brand: all ways in which, having sold you the item, the manufacturer, the company, clings onto it, using the label to signify their continued half-ownership of the thing you’ve ostensibly bought.

This is why I cut off the label, this is why I refuse this weird and silent form of surveillance, as I think of it, this is why I pluck it out at the very root or seams, however you want to call it, so that I can truly own it, so that its fingers are not scratching at my fucking neck or the small of my back or my side. The labels cut out, ironed and pressed: now it cannot be recalled, now is it wholly given over to me.