Digital product passports: from 2028, every garment sold in Europe gets a record. You should already have one.

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation — ESPR, in force since 2024 — gives the European Commission the power to require a Digital Product Passport for whole categories of goods sold in the Union: a machine-readable record attached to the product, reachable through a code on the item, carrying data about what it is, what it is made of and what should happen to it at the end of its life. Batteries went first. Textiles are near the front of the queue behind them. The Commission’s working plan for 2025–2030 sets an indicative 2027 for the delegated act covering clothing, fashion accessories and home textiles; delegated acts apply eighteen months after they enter into force, which puts mandatory passports for apparel realistically in 2028. Footwear is being assessed separately, with conclusions expected by the end of 2027.

What exactly goes into a textile passport is still being specified, and the industry is lobbying over every field. But the direction is clear from the regulation’s purpose and from the batteries precedent: fibre composition; country and facility of origin; care instructions; repairability and the availability of spare parts, which for clothing means things like replacement buttons and zips; recycled content; substances of concern; and a stable, unique identifier that survives the garment being resold. The point is traceability — a garment that can say what it is made of and where it has been, to a recycler at the end, a reseller in the middle, or the person who owns it now.

The batteries regulation shows what the textile one will look like in practice, because it went first. From 2027 every industrial and electric-vehicle battery sold in the EU must carry a passport reachable through a QR code, with a public tier — capacity, chemistry, manufacturer — and restricted tiers for repairers, recyclers and regulators. The identifier is a unique product code registered in a central registry; the data is held by the manufacturer and made available through a standard interface. Textiles will follow the same pattern with different fields, and the two years between the delegated act and its application are the time brands have to build the systems that hold the data.

For the wearer the more immediate change is subtler. Composition and care are already on a sewn label; what a passport adds is that they become machine-readable, durable and specific to the individual item rather than the style. That is the difference between “this kind of shirt is cotton” and “this shirt, serial such-and-such, is cotton from this mill, cut in this factory, in this month”. A resale platform can verify it, a recycler can sort by it, and an application that holds the wearer’s wardrobe can attach a wear history to it and follow the garment through its whole life.

Read that last clause again, because the industry conversation is almost entirely about compliance and almost never about the owner. A passport is only useful to you if something on your side reads it and keeps it. Otherwise it is a QR code you scanned once in a shop and never again, and the record goes back to being what it always was — the brand’s, not yours.

This is where a wardrobe record and a product passport turn out to be the same object seen from two ends. The brand knows composition, origin, care and construction at the moment of manufacture. The wearer knows purchase price, wear count, alterations, laundry history, what it goes with and what it has been worn to. Neither half is complete alone; the brand’s half without the wearer’s is a spec sheet, and the wearer’s half without the brand’s is a diary with no subject. A wardrobe application that stores the brand’s half as structured data — not as a photograph of a label — is already a passport reader waiting for passports to arrive.

ZIMRICS was built to record the brand’s half by hand and by eye today — composition from the label, care from the pictograms, brand, the crafts in the stitching — precisely so that the fields exist to receive the same information from a code when a code can supply it. The wearer’s half it has kept from the beginning. Put together, they are what a regulator, a reseller and, frankly, your future self would want to know about a garment: what it is, and what it has done.

There is a security dimension to this that the policy discussion has barely touched, and it is the one I would flag to anyone building in the space. A passport is a globally unique identifier on a physical object a person carries and wears. Scanned at a till, a resale desk or a recycling point, it creates a record of where that object — and by extension its owner — has been. The regulation contemplates access tiers, so that a consumer sees care instructions and a recycler sees fibre chemistry. But the identifier itself is the sensitive part, and the wardrobe application that holds it on the owner’s behalf must treat it the way it treats a photograph of the owner: as theirs, stored where they can see it, deleted when they say. A passport should serve the wearer. It should never become a tag.

The counter-argument from the industry is cost, and it is not entirely wrong. Attaching a unique identifier to every garment, holding its data for the life of the product and serving it on demand is real infrastructure, and for a fast-fashion label turning over tens of thousands of styles a year it is a great deal of infrastructure for products designed to be forgotten in a season. That, of course, is the regulation’s point. A passport makes a garment accountable, and accountability is expensive for things that were not built to last. The brands that already know what their clothes are made of and where they were made will find the passport a formatting exercise. The ones that do not will find it a mirror.

For anyone building in this space, the practical advice is simple and slightly boring. Model garments as records now, with fields that map onto the emerging passport vocabulary — composition as fibre and percentage, not a string; care as coded instructions; origin as a place; identifiers as identifiers — rather than as photographs with captions. The regulation will settle the exact schema over the next two years. The data model should not wait for it, because a wardrobe of records can be migrated and a wardrobe of snapshots cannot.

And for anyone who just owns clothes: the record is coming whether or not you keep one. The only question is whether it lives in the brand’s database, describing a product, or in yours, describing what you own. The second is more useful to you, and it is available today.