> I don't recall them before Unicode. I do recall "dry clean only" on the tags, etc.
These icons are far older than unicode, and in fact is not in unicode at the moment. There's a proposal to add them, but I don't believe it's passed yet. The standardized icons themselves date from the 1970s, though non-standard laundry symbols are much older than that.
Design use of icons over text has nothing to do with Unicode, it's a natural part of human expression. Icons are everywhere, from traffic signs to laundry symbols to buttons on computers to ramblings signs. I think your reading of the typographical history here is simply wrong, neither Apple nor Unicode is responsible for the "iconiziation" of communication. We've always used icons for communication, and we always will.
If your issue is with Emoji, then you should make that case instead. Personally, i think it's great that if I send an emoji from an iPhone to an Android phone (or from/to essentially any device), you get a consistent symbol, instead of being locked in to whatever your manufacturer was using (the fact that this kind of lock-in was occurring was the original motivation for adding emoji to Unicode).
Btw, laundry symbols are a perfect demonstration for another wonderful feature of using icons: they're cross language. You can put one tag on a piece of clothing and sell it anywhere in the world. Not everyone speaks English.