Fibre vs fabric vs finish vs certification

Shoppers are used to treating a garment's story as one fact, when it is really four separate layers stacked on top of each other. Keeping them apart is the single most useful habit for reading any product description without being misled.

Fibre: what the yarn is made from

The fibre is the raw material — cotton, polyester, viscose, wool. It sets the baseline behaviour: how much moisture the material absorbs versus moves away from skin, how it insulates, how it stretches or resists stretch, whether it will biodegrade. Two garments made from the same fibre can still feel completely different, which is where the next layer comes in.

Fabric: how the yarn was constructed

Fabric is the structure the fibre was knitted or woven into — jersey, rib, twill, fleece. A cotton jersey tee and a cotton twill shirt share a fibre but behave differently on the body because the construction changes how air and moisture move through the material. Weight (grams per square metre) belongs here too: a 120gsm cotton jersey and a 220gsm cotton jersey are the same fibre and roughly the same fabric family, but one drapes and breathes very differently from the other.

Finish: what was added afterward

A finish is a treatment applied to the finished fabric to change one property — durable water repellency, wrinkle resistance, an antimicrobial coating, a softener. Finishes are the layer most likely to introduce a trade-off: a wrinkle-resistant resin can reduce breathability, an antimicrobial treatment can wash out over time. Finishes are declared separately from fibre content because they are chemistry added on top of the base material, not a property of the fibre itself.

Certification: who checked, and against what

A certification is a third party's confirmation that a specific standard was met — GOTS confirms organic fibre content plus processing criteria; OEKO-TEX STANDARD 100 confirms the finished article was tested against harmful-substance limit values. A certification says nothing about fibre, fabric or finish on its own; it only tells you which standard was checked and, if the scheme publishes a database, lets you verify the licence number yourself.

How we record this

We store each of these four layers as its own field on a product, and we show the evidence level behind whichever one a brand has actually documented. A product can have a fully specified fibre and fabric, an undisclosed finish, and no certification at all — and we will show exactly that mix rather than rounding it up to a single tidy score.

What to look for

• Whether a description names the fibre, or just says "soft" and "breathable" without a composition line.
• Whether a finish (wrinkle-resistant, water-repellent) is disclosed as an addition, not folded into the fibre claim.
• Whether a certification names the specific scheme, not a generic "eco" badge.