Turn the blouse inside out. Find the tag. Read it once, then read the space around it — the strip of woven cotton stitched into the neck seam, and the smaller tag below it if there is one. Somewhere on that little architecture, you are looking for a line that names a country. Made in USA. Made in Italy. Fabriqué en France. If it is there, note the phrasing. If it is not there at all — not misplaced, not faded, simply absent — that silence is doing work. A missing country line is a date, or the ghost of one.
Most people reading a vintage tag look for the loud things first. The union label, the serif logo, the care symbols. Country of origin sits quieter, and because it sits quieter it gets skipped, and because it gets skipped its absence gets misread as ambiguity. It isn't ambiguity. The rule that put that line on the tag has a year on it, and once you know the year, the absence becomes a ceiling — a latest-possible date the garment could have been made for that market. The tag stopped being allowed to stay silent.
In the United States, the shift arrived with the Textile Fiber Products Identification Act and the enforcement pattern that hardened around it through the seventies and into the early eighties. By 1984, a garment sold into the American market was expected to carry its country of origin plainly on a permanent label, not a hangtag, not a sticker, not the invoice. Before that, the line drifted. Sometimes present, sometimes on a separate slip that fell off in the first wash, sometimes assumed from the union local stamped above it. After that, the line stays. If a garment made for the US market has no country line and never had one, you are looking at something earlier than the mid-eighties for that market.
Europe moved on a parallel track with different edges. The European rules on textile labelling tightened through the seventies and eighties, and while country-of-origin phrasing wasn't uniform across every member state at the same moment, by the late eighties a garment produced and sold within the community had a clear expectation of that line, in the local language or in trade English. Fabriqué en. Made in. Hergestellt in. Prodotto in. The phrasing is a small clue in itself — the country line often gives the market it was cut for, not only the country it was cut in.
So the reading goes like this. You find a woven label at the neck, all-caps serif, brand mark centred, fibre content on a second tag below. You check the second tag for care symbols — those little squares and circles adopted through the seventies. You look for the country line. It isn't there. Not faded, not trimmed off; the tag was made without it. The RN number is present, or it isn't. The union mark is present, or it isn't. Each of these is a feature. The country line, absent, is also a feature — it caps the latest date the garment could plausibly have been sold new into the American market at somewhere around the middle of the nineteen-eighties, and often earlier depending on what else the tag is doing.
A warning about the ceiling. Absence dates the tag as it was made, not the garment as it now sits on the table. Deadstock lingers. A blouse cut in 1978 could hang in a warehouse for a decade before it reached a buyer. A tag reprinted for a small run in the early eighties might still be following an older template. Absence is a ceiling, not a floor — it tells you what the garment cannot be later than, not what it must be earlier than. The floor comes from the other features: the union placement, the RN, the care symbols, the seam finish.
There is one more thing worth saying, and it is a habit rather than a rule. Read the tag last. Feel the cloth first, look at the selvedge if you can find it, check the hem finish, the placket, the way the collar is set. The garment already spoke before the label got its turn. The country line, when you finally arrive at it, either confirms what the cloth told you or complicates it — and complications are useful. A tag that says one thing while the seams say another is a garment worth slowing down over.
One observation, then you decide. If the country line is missing and the tag was made that way, the garment is not from after the mid-eighties for its market. That is a narrower claim than most people are willing to make from a single feature, and it is the kind of narrower claim the tag will actually support.