I was standing in the return line at the sprawling Bob’s Stores inside the Farmington Valley Mall when I realized I might have sensitivity issues. It was the summer of 2001, and “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)” was playing in every retail location with a speaker system. My parents were trying on shoes or whatever it was adults bought back then, while I quietly sang along to the music above.
For as long as I could remember, I’d been cutting the tags out of my t-shirts, hoodies, and button-ups with the merciless precision of a mad surgeon, but had finally met my match. Even the silky smooth voice of Train frontman Pat Monahan couldn’t distract me from my mission: return the shirt. This shirt — a baby blue tee with a vaguely tribal/Hawaiian design on the front – was boring holes in my sanity had to go back to the fresh hell it came from. Printed on the back of the shirt in cheap ink was the “tag” that would flake off and stick to the back of my neck during humid Connecticut summers.
I loved how that shirt fit my pre-teen soft potato body, but the omnipresent scratch nagged at me and made me want to claw my eyes out of my skull. It was a love/hate relationship that I couldn’t divebomb or mask my way out of – a relationship I was starting to suspect most people didn’t feel with my level of intensity.
Ransack the drawers of any neurodivergent homosapien, and you’re bound to find a treasure trove of shirts, shorts, blouses, jorts, and sweats bearing a hole where the tag used to be. It’s a surprisingly common form of tactile defensiveness that accompanies neurodivergence, in which clothing tags, seams, or certain fabrics can cause discomfort, irritation, and sometimes full-on meltdowns.
My inability to get over seemingly minor discomforts made me feel finicky and fickle, while the holes in my shirts gave me the vibe of a street urchin.
When you’re hit with a diagnosis later in life, you tend to spend time reflecting on the various habits and foibles that dictated your days before therapy or medication. You start to poke holes in the normalcy of it all and come to realizations akin to the nebulous existence of the easter bunny. My inability to get over seemingly minor discomforts made me feel finicky and fickle, while the holes in my shirts gave me the vibe of a street urchin. I was never able to return the offending shirt – something about stains, holes, and not having a receipt. Some people just don’t know how to party.
Since its inception more than a century ago, the clothing tag’s form and function have evolved, designating it as a necessary but wholly irrelevant part of life. Unless you’re neurodivergent. The clothing tag emerged from the golden cube of industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, and regulation. During the 1960s, U.S. legislation began regulating clothing labels, requiring manufacturers to include standardized information like care instructions, country of origin, and fabric composition.
Did you know most custom clothing tags add an estimated $0.03 – $0.20 per label? Is it possible that we’re holding onto a relic of the past when there’s ample room for branding, sustainability information, and washing instructions online? I’m just an American asking questions.
For me, the Tagony eventually dulled with age (and propranolol), but avoiding the scratchy fabric on my skin is a sensation that is still strong enough to dictate how I dress. There will always be those particular garments with tags that trigger the type of discomfort that’s hard to explain to normies.
