A scarf and a length of upholstery fabric can be cut from the identical bolt of cloth and still land in two different trademark classes. That's the line Nice Class 24 exists to draw: fabric is Class 24, but the moment it becomes a finished, wearable garment — even a simple scarf — it crosses into Class 25. Nothing else about this class trips up more textile and apparel founders than that single distinction.
What Actually Lives Here
- Woven, knitted, and non-woven fabrics and textile piece goods
- Bed linen, sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers, bedspreads
- Blankets, throws, quilts
- Towels, washcloths, bath linen
- Curtains, drapes, textile window coverings
- Table linen — tablecloths, napkins, runners
- Textile wall hangings
A textile mill or fabric brand files here. An apparel label files in Class 25 instead. A brand that sells fabric by the yard and finished garments — which does happen, particularly with heritage textile houses — needs both. The fastest gut check: is the product worn as clothing, or used as material or a home furnishing? If it's worn, it's Class 25 regardless of fabric type.
The Rest of the Room Splits Off Too
Furniture, including beds and mattresses, is Class 20 — not Class 24, even though bedding lives right alongside it in the room. Yarns and threads are Class 23. Floor coverings and rugs are Class 27. A complete bedroom range genuinely spans Class 24 for the linens, Class 20 for the bed, and Class 27 for the rug — three separate registrations for what reads to a customer as one purchase. Cushions split the same way covers do elsewhere in the home classes: the filled cushion form is Class 20, while the decorative textile cover is Class 24.
When a Pattern Becomes the Brand
Textiles is one of the few categories where a distinctive pattern — a signature check, stripe, or print — can function as a source identifier in its own right, protected as a figurative mark or trade dress rather than riding solely on the brand name. Pendleton's woven blanket patterns are the clearest example: instantly associated with the maker independent of any logo. The nuance is that purely ornamental patterns, ones that just decorate rather than identify source, are genuinely hard to register — where a design sits on the distinctiveness scale determines how it gets treated. Brooklinen and Frette anchor the more conventional wordmark side of the class, one built around direct-to-consumer bedding and the other around heritage luxury linens.
Scarves, Blankets, and the Handful of Genuinely Ambiguous Items
Most Class 24 versus Class 25 questions resolve cleanly with the "is it worn" test described above, but a handful of products sit close enough to the line that they're worth naming individually. A scarf is Class 25, because it's worn as an accessory regardless of how similar the fabric is to something sold by the yard. A throw blanket, by contrast, stays in Class 24 even though it's sometimes worn around the shoulders the way a scarf is, because it's marketed and sold as a home textile rather than an article of clothing — intent and marketing context matter here as much as physical use. Ponchos and wearable blankets occupy genuinely contested territory, and brands selling that kind of hybrid item often file in both classes rather than bet the whole registration on a single interpretation of "worn."
Trade Names in the Textile Mill Business
Away from the consumer-facing bedding and pattern side of Class 24 sits a large, quieter B2B segment: mills and converters who sell fabric by the bolt to garment manufacturers, upholsterers, and other textile businesses rather than directly to shoppers. These companies often trademark specific fabric technologies or proprietary weaves — a moisture-wicking blend or a particular weave structure — as much as they trademark a consumer-facing collection name, since the buyer they're actually selling to is another business evaluating fabric performance rather than a retail customer evaluating a look. That trade-facing naming convention explains why a search of the Class 24 register turns up a mix of consumer collection names, like a bedding line, alongside technical-sounding fabric-technology marks that never appear on a retail hangtag at all.
Search registered Class 24 trademarks before you commit to a collection or label — clearance here should span Class 24, Class 25, and Class 20 together, given how tightly the three overlap in any home-and-apparel business.