Babies love fabric tags. If you give a baby a new stuffed animal, they will quickly navigate to the shiny fabric label, usually sticking perpendicular out of the bunny’s lower side, and work on their pincer strength to fiddle and explore its differentiated texture, colour and tiny black and white writing.
Fabric tags now appear on nearly every textile-based consumer product available for purchase, but this was not always the case. Oddly enough, one of the earliest forces behind their widespread use was not the great capitalist minds of the nineteenth century, but organized labour: the proletariat, the symbol of the working man. Fashion houses and tailors had already used various labels and maker’s marks on bespoke clothing, but as ready-to-wear garments began thundering off the assembly lines and sweatshops of the 19th century, labeling them was not yet universal. Beginning in the 1880s, workers’ unions introduced standardized fabric labels that could be used across participating manufacturers. Sewn into a garment, the union label certified that the article had been cut, stitched and finished under union conditions. In a fitting reversal, one of the most familiar instruments of modern branding was popularized not by the owners of the factories, but by the people working inside them.
Then came the fine print.
Like everything else in our society, the lawyers and bureaucrats saw an opportunity to add their little flair on our garments. RN codes, CA codes, location of manufacturer. material contents in various languages, assorted bits of legalese and an entire system of hieroglyphs signifying washing instructions. Their direct translations have long since been lost to the sands of the Sahara.
Over time, this has resulted in certain fabric labels becoming comically long. The most comical, although not entirely related, example I recently encountered was a giant tag hanging from the cord of my baby monitor. It warned that the cord could possibly be a danger to my child. Naturally, this shiny and massive tag of red, black and yellow became an obsession, getting her to crawl over and pull on the cord, making the camera fall off the shelf and giving ample additional cord to now choke herself with, not to mention the risk of falling plastic cameras to land on her head. I have since cut off the label and fastened the cord to the wall. I’m sure the irony is lost on the bureaucrats and lawyers.
Thus goes the birth of the modern fabric tag in all its multi-tab glory.
What I have realized through my baby’s obsession with these tags is not that babies have a peculiar interest in them. It is that fabric tags are so omnipresent that adults no longer acknowledge them at all.
We sew them into small baby toys. They stick out at strange angles. They have odd textures and high-contrast black-and-white printing specifically intended to be noticed. It is completely understandable that a baby would pick up a new toy and think, “Hold on, what the hell is this thing all about?”
Babies have not learned what tags are yet. They have not named them, organized them in their minds and filed them away as something that is always there and therefore no longer demands attention.
This is how our brains are wired. We stop seeing things as they are. We block out huge parts of the day by sorting similar things in our heads and moving on. Of course, this is necessary for adult life. We do not have time to admire each tree we pass as a fascinating expression of God’s majesty. Instead, we think, “Tree. Don’t walk into it,” as we answer an email on the way to the car.
Babies have time to admire the tree, partially because they do not really know what a tree is. They have not yet reduced it to a category. They are still seeing the tree as it actually is. In that sense, they can see more of the world than we can.
This brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves in Montreal.
If you live here, or have visited before, you have probably noticed the giant cross prominently placed atop the mountain in the middle of the city. It can be seen from downtown and looms over the Plateau. In the Old Port, shops sell coffee mugs and tote bags illustrated with the mountain and its little cross. At night, it is illuminated by a city-owned system of hundreds of lights.
(Not to get too far off topic, but I find it interesting that a supposedly secular province considers it perfectly natural to use public money to maintain and illuminate a massive symbol of the Christian lord and savior dying for everyone’s sins, but god forbid my child’s overworked and underpaid public school teacher wears hijab. It seems the cross also stands as a shining monument to the hypocrisy pumping through the sang bleu of Quebec’s politicians, lit every night by the municipalities tax payers.)
What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that two enormous communications towers also stand atop the mountain. They are larger than the cross and also illuminated by blinking lights at night, yet we have almost completely wiped them from our collective consciousness.
Like the labels sewn into our clothing, it is not that we cannot see them. They are there every single day. We have simply decided, unconsciously, that they do not need to be seen. We do not depict the towers on souvenir mugs. We do not remember their jagged and ugly points when we imagine looking up at the mountain from the Plateau.
A baby has not yet learned which part of the mountain is the monument, and which part can be ignored. The cross, the towers and the blinking red lights all belong equally to the picture.
For a little while, before the world supplies the names, they can still see the whole thing.
