The Fabric Census: Half of Clothing Listings Won't Tell You What They're Made Of

Half the racks are silent

Of 66,045 in-stock listings, 33,865 — 51.3% — carry fiber content somewhere a machine can read it: the product name ("Merino Crew"), the structured tags brands attach to listings, or the merchandising feeds they publish to partners. The other 48.7% say nothing in any of those places.

That doesn't always mean the brand hides the information from a human reading the product page — some bury it in description prose. But machine-readable is what the modern shopping stack runs on. When fiber content is absent from a listing's data, every fabric filter on every shopping tool is blind to that garment, price-comparison engines can't group like with like, and a search for "linen shirt" simply never surfaces it. Our own catalog search can filter half these listings by fiber; the other half are invisible to that filter for exactly this reason.

Disclosure is also wildly uneven by brand: some publish fiber on effectively every listing, others on almost none. The pattern is consistent enough that silence looks less like oversight and more like a merchandising choice.

The polyester myth doesn't survive contact with the data

The folklore says cheap clothing is plastic and expensive clothing is natural fiber. Among listings that disclose, here is the primarily-synthetic share by price band: 5.2% under $40, 4.3% at $40–80, 4.2% at $80–150, 2.0% at $150–300, and 4.7% above $300.

That line is almost flat. The under-$40 rack in this sample is two-thirds cotton. And the $300-plus rail has a higher primarily-synthetic share than the $150–300 band — technical outerwear and performance fabrics live at high prices too.

Two honest caveats. First, we classify each garment by its leading fiber, so a 60/40 cotton-poly blend counts as cotton — this measures garments that are primarily synthetic, not every garment containing synthetics. Second, our 64 brands skew direct-to-consumer and premium; the fast-fashion giants that anchor the polyester stereotype don't publish catalogs we can ingest. Within the world of brand stores shoppers actually browse for quality, though, the conclusion holds: price tells you almost nothing about whether a garment is synthetic. Only the composition line does.

The fiber price ladder

Median list price by primary fiber, across every listing that discloses one: fleece $63, cotton $129, synthetic $137, down $175, linen $178, denim $189, wool $295, cashmere $313, silk $325, leather $716.

The ladder confirms some intuitions — animal fibers and leather at the top, fleece at the bottom — and breaks others. The median primarily-synthetic garment ($137) costs more than the median cotton one ($129): in direct-to-consumer apparel, synthetics are mostly technical fabrics commanding technical prices, not budget filler. Denim's $189 median sits well above plain cotton's $129, a premium we took apart seam by seam in our denim cost study.

The incredible shrinking cashmere premium

The median cashmere listing costs $313. The median wool listing costs $295. That's an $18 gap — about 6% — between the fiber that anchors luxury knitwear marketing and ordinary wool.

Cashmere is also no longer rare: 41.5% of sweater listings with disclosed fiber are cashmere — it's the single most common disclosed sweater fiber in this sample, ahead of wool itself. Whatever cashmere signified when it cost multiples of wool, in today's direct-to-consumer market it is a mainstream material at a modest premium.

One caution our data can't resolve: "cashmere" on a label spans a wide quality range — fiber length, ply, and knit density vary enormously and our price data can't grade them. A $95 cashmere crew and a $600 one differ by more than margin. The takeaway isn't that cashmere is a bargain; it's that the word alone no longer justifies a luxury price.

What to do with this at the checkout

Three habits fall out of this data. First, read the composition line, not the price tag — price predicts fiber so poorly that a $300 garment is as likely to be primarily synthetic as a $40 one. Second, when a listing won't tell you what it's made of, treat that silence as information: disclosure costs a brand nothing, and the brands that skip it are choosing to. Third, calibrate fiber premiums to the ladder — wool at $295 and cashmere at $313 are eighteen dollars apart, so pay cashmere prices for verified quality, not for the word.

Every fiber figure on this page powers the same filters you can use directly: our catalog search filters by material across the disclosed half of these listings, and the category pages break out fabric in every review.