Fashion Terms by Category — the small components that finish a garment: labels, care symbols, tickets, hangers and notions.
Trimming terms cover the small components that finish a garment and carry its information — the labels, tags, hangers and notions that shoppers barely notice but production teams obsess over. The woven label carries the brand; the care label carries instructions the law requires; the barcoded ticket lets a warehouse track the piece; the hanger is how it travels and how it is displayed. This category is where the glossary keeps that finishing vocabulary.
Six label terms from across the glossary — carton labels, clothing labels, bar code labels, garment labeling terms, GTIN and heat transfer labels — are gathered here, alongside the care-symbol systems, tickets and hanger hardware. Printed Labels remains cross-listed with the manufacturing category, where it also belongs.
Labels are the garment’s identity documents. Woven labels carry the brand in thread; printed labels carry it in ink; clothing labels is the general entry for the whole family; garment labeling terms covers the rules and vocabulary of what must be labeled and why; heat transfer labels apply branding with heat instead of a sewn tag; and the labels overview ties together the apparel-industry side of the subject. Label content is regulated as well as branded: fiber content, country of origin and care instructions are legal requirements in most markets, which is why labeling has a terminology — and a compliance industry — entirely of its own.
Care information has its own international language, because a washing machine symbol needs no translation. Wash care labels carry the instructions on the garment; ISO care symbols are the global pictogram standard behind them; and NAFTA care symbols are the North American variant — three entries that anyone producing garments for more than one market needs to keep straight.
Before a garment can be sold, it has to be countable. EPC labels put radio-frequency identification into the supply chain; G10 bar code labels and the GTIN numbering system give products and cases their scannable identities; carton labels identify whole cases in the warehouse; price tags carry the number the shopper sees; and joker tickets are the small add-on tickets used for promotions and special pricing.
The hardware shelf. Garment hangers and the VICS hanger standard move clothes from factory floor to sales floor; chipboards — and their grain direction — keep packaged shirts crisp; invisible zippers are the seam-finishing trim hiding inside dresses and skirts; notions is the umbrella term for all the small sewing items a workroom stocks; and swift tacks with tagging tools are how tickets get attached quickly without damaging the goods. Notions are the oldest vocabulary on this page: the word itself is centuries old, and the category still expands whenever a new closure, fastener or finishing trick reaches the workroom.
For the components and trim themselves, and the factories that apply them, see the Apparel Search components and trimming resources and the manufacturer directories.
Why trims have a category of their own: they are bought separately, specified separately in the tech pack, and costed separately in production — and a garment can fail quality control over a label or a hanger as surely as over a seam. Readers arriving from the manufacturing category will find the same production logic applied here at the smallest scale.
Labels are also a production topic — see Printed Labels and the size-spec vocabulary in the Apparel Manufacturing Terms category — and every term on this page appears in the A–Z glossary at the Fashion Terms hub.