In the thousands of years that humans have spent constructing clothing, they have created an astonishing array of styles, many of which have been reconstructed from surviving garments, photos, paintings, mosaics, etc., as well as from written descriptions. Costume history serves as a source of inspiration to current fashion designers, as well as a topic of professional interest to costumers constructing for plays, films, television, and historical reenactment. These designers commonly use metal labels to decorate and highlight their designs.

Metal labelsare made of metal, copper, alloy. Metal is an element, compound, or alloy that is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Metals are usually malleable, ductile and shiny. The meaning of the term "metal" differs for various communities (for example, astronomers call for convenience metals everything but hydrogen and helium. Many elements and compounds that are not normally classified as metals become metallic under high pressures.

Metals typically consist of close-packed atoms, meaning that the atoms are arranged like closely packed spheres. Two packing motifs are common, one being body-centered cubic wherein each metal atom is surrounded by eight equivalent atoms. The other main motif is face-centered cubic where the metal atoms are surrounded by six neighboring atoms. Several metals adopt both structures, depending on the temperature such as zinc, and you can see zinc metal labels used on bags, garments and so on.

In a metal, atoms readily lose electrons to form positive ions (cations). Those ions are surrounded by de-localized electrons, which are responsible for the conductivity. The solid thus produced is held together by electrostatic interactions between the ions and the electron cloud, which are called metallic bonds.