EU Tests Find 49 Clothing Samples Had Mislabelled Materials

Pick up almost any piece of clothing you own and look inside at the label. You will probably find a tag that says 100% cotton or 50% polyester, 30% viscose.

Are those really facts? We doubt it, because a European investigation found something worrying.

In an EU-wide testing campaign, authorities bought and lab-tested 132 clothing items. Of those, 37% (49 samples) had fibre compositions that did not match what was declared on the label.

The European Commission identified three main problems.

Some garments contained the fibres stated on the label, but in different percentages. Others contained cheaper fibres than those declared, and some had fibres that were incorrectly named altogether. 

So why are labels getting it wrong?

There is no evidence that every incorrect label comes from deliberate deception.

Fashion supply chains involve many stages, from fibre producers and mills to manufacturers, importers and brands. Information has to pass through all of them before it reaches the label on your shirt.

But complexity cannot be an excuse for inaccurate information.

A 2023 BBC article, Why Fabric Fraud Is So Easy to Hide, explains this in detail -  “With complex, fragmented supply chains that sometimes rely on a literal paper trail, where each step in the chain might happen in a different country, it's easy to see how mislabelling can happen.”

The European testing campaign is calling on businesses to conduct rigorous testing of finished garments and fabric rolls.

Simply receiving material information from the previous supplier in the chain should not end the responsibility. Someone has to verify it.

And there need to be consequences when nobody does.

If you check your wardrobe now, try this with one piece of clothing you own. Take a garment from your wardrobe and see how far you can actually trace it.

A “Made in” label tells you where the clothing was made, not necessarily where the raw materials came from.

The EU's Digital Product Passport system is being developed to make product information more traceable across supply chains, and its central DPP Registry officially became operational on 20 July 2026.

But for developing nations, this can be a struggle. Many textile suppliers still lack the digital systems, reliable data and technical capacity needed to trace product information at every stage of the supply chain.

If we want fashion to become genuinely circular, traceability has to begin with getting the basic facts right.