Wearing the Law: How Clothing Passports Make Legaltech Fashionable

The Shirt on Your Back

By 2030, every item of clothing sold in the European Union may come with a digital product passport (DPP).  These are scannable record logs of everything from where the cotton was grown to how it should be recycled. It’s a quiet revolution in fashion, but its implications go far beyond your wardrobe. Behind this innovation lies an unlikely hero: legal infrastructure.

What Are Digital Product Passports?

DPPs are part of a broader push to enable transparency across the supply chain. They store detailed information about a garment’s origin, materials, manufacturing process, care instructions, and lifecycle. These passports help consumers make informed choices, facilitate resale and recycling, and hold brands accountable for sustainability claims. They are also a critical tool to help reduce this environmental footprint by promoting durability, repairability, and recyclability.

Fast fashion generates 92 million tons of waste annually and contributes 10% of global carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. In response, the EU is leading the charge with its Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, which will require DPPs for all textiles by 2030.

Who’s Leading the Shift and What Powers It?

The fashion industry is already adapting, with over 62.5 billion digital product passports projected to be in circulation by 2030. Major brands like H&M, Zara, Zalando, and Chloé are leading the way, piloting or preparing for full-scale adoption by 2026.

To put the scale into perspective: 

• H&M sells over 3 billion items annually.

• Zara produces 450 million garments with 20,000 new styles each year.

• Zalando ships over 250 million orders. 

• Luxury brand Chloé launched Chloé Vertical in 2022 with 20 products that customers can authenticate, repair, and resell. By 2025, Chloé aims to source 90% of materials from lower-impact alternatives.

These examples show that DPPs are gaining traction across the spectrum, from fast fashion to luxury. The tech is also keeping pace: The global DPP market was valued at $183 million in 2024 and is projected to grow at a 22.6% CAGR through 2034. Powered by QR codes, NFC tags, and blockchain, these tools ensure DPPs are secure, accessible, and continuously updatable.

Legaltech in Disguise

Though they appear as tools for sustainability or supply chain management, DPPs are deeply legal. Their real power comes from encoding legal obligations like regulatory compliance, warranty terms, or labor standards into a digital, machine-readable format. In other words, they operationalize law.

Several areas of law come into play:

• Compliance: DPPs help brands comply with regulations like the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which is central to the EU’s Green Deal and sustainability goals.

• Contract Law: Smart contracts can govern resale terms or verify product authenticity.

• Data Privacy: Tracking resale or returns may invoke GDPR and other privacy laws.

• Intellectual Property: Blockchain-based authentication supports anti-counterfeiting efforts.

Legaltech tools like digital identity verification, contract management systems, and automated compliance trackers are the backbone enabling DPPs to function.

Beyond the Closet

The logic behind digital passports is spreading. Electronics, fine art, even food products are starting to come with traceable digital records. For example, Artclear, digital asset management for art, creates a digital passport for each artwork using high-precision scanning technology that can tell even nearly identical prints apart, helping artists, collectors, and galleries prove authenticity and protect against forgery. Nespresso has partnered with social impact startup OpenSC to digitally trace every bag of KAHAWA ya CONGO coffee from over 1,100 smallholder farms in the DRC, ensuring transparent sourcing and direct premium payments to farmers. 

As more industries adopt these systems, the ability to translate legal frameworks into interoperable, trustworthy data will become a competitive advantage. This is the power of legaltech: it turns dense legal theory into practical, machine-readable rules that anyone—not just lawyers—can understand and act on.

Legal Is Everywhere

The rise of clothing passports underscores a broader truth: law is embedded in our daily lives in invisible ways. We don’t often think about supply chain contracts or data protection when we buy a T-shirt. But behind every tag is a web of rights, responsibilities, and regulations.

As digital infrastructure becomes more embedded in the physical world, legal infrastructure will follow. And that’s not just a compliance issue, it’s a design opportunity. Legaltech isn’t just about digitizing old processes. It’s about building new systems that make rights and rules operational from the outset.

A New Kind of Label

Your next shirt might carry more than just a size and washing instructions. It might carry a data trail, a legal and ethical story encoded in its digital passport. And behind that, a suite of legaltech tools ensuring that the story is transparent, traceable, and trustworthy. Legaltech is woven into more than just law firms. It’s sewn into the very fabric of our lives.