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Designer Clothing Terminology Simplified
Clothing terminology comprises the names of individual garments and
classes of garments, as well as the specialized vocabularies of the
trades that have designed, manufactured, marketed and sold clothing
over hundreds of years.
Clothing
terminology ranges from the arcane (watchet, a pale blue color name
from the sixteenth century) to the everyday (t-shirt), and changes
over time in response to fashion which in turn reflects social,
artistic, and political trends.
Despite the
constant introduction of new terms by fashion designers, clothing
manufacturers and marketers, the names for several basic garment
classes in English are very stable over time. Gown, shirt/skirt,
frock, and coat are all
attested back to the early medieval period.
Gown (from
medieval Latin gunna) was a basic clothing term for hundreds of
years, referring to a garment that hangs from the shoulders. In
medieval and renaissance England gown referred to a loose outer
garment worn by both men and women, sometimes short, more often ankle
length, with sleeves. By the eighteenth century gown had become a
standard category term for a woman's dress, a meaning it retained
until the mid-twentieth century. Only in the last few decades has
gown lost this general meaning in favor of dress. Today the term gown
is rare except in specialized cases: academic dress or cap and gown, evening
gown, nightgown, hospital gown, and so on (see Gown).
Shirt and
skirt are originally the same word, the former being the southern and
the latter the northern pronunciation in early Middle English. Like
gown, shirt is becoming a specialized term in Britain, though it
retains its general meaning in the U.S. (see Shirt).
Coat remains a
term for an overgarment, its essential meaning for the last thousand
years (see Coat).
Names for new
styles or fashions in clothing are frequently the deliberate
inventions of fashion designers or clothing manufacturers; these
include Chanel's Little Black Dress (a term which has survived) and
Lanvin's robe de style (which has not). Other terms are of more
obscure origin.
Clothing
styles are frequently named after people ??often with a military connection:
The Garibaldi
jacket and Garibaldi shirt were bright red woolen garments for women
with black embroidery or braid and military details popular in the
1860s; they are named after the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe
Garibaldi who visited England in 1863.
The Eisenhower
jacket or "Ike" jacket is a waist-length, military jacket
of World War II origins. Called the "Jacket, Field, Wool,
M-1944", it was commissioned by then General Dwight Eisenhower
as a new field jacket for the
US Forces in Northern Europe. The jacket was based on the British
Army 'Battle Dress' jacket of the same era.
The cardigan
is a knitted jacket or button-front sweater created to keep British
soldiers warm in Russian winters. It is named for James Brudenell,
7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade in the
Crimean War (1854).
The Mao jacket
is a very plain (often grey), high-collared, shirtlike jacket
customarily worn by Mao Zedong and the people of China during his
regime. Its drab design and uniformity was a reaction to
pre-Revolution class distinctions of clothes, with elites dressing in
elaborate silks, while poor laborers wore very rough clothes.
The Nehru
jacket is a uniform jacket without lapels or collars, popularized by
Jawaharial Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India.
Another
fertile source for clothing terms is place names, which usually
reflect the origin (or supposed origin) of a fashion. Modern terms
such as Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts, and Fair Isle sweaters are
the latest in a long line that stretches back to holland (linen),
damask ("from Damascus"), polonaise ("in the fashion
of Polish women"), jersey (originally Jersey frock), Balaclava,
mantua, and denim ("serge
de after the city).
Costume
historians, with a "rearward-looking" view, require names
for clothing styles that were not used (or needed) when the styles
were actually worn. For example, the Van Dyke collar is so-called
from its appearances in seventeenth century portraits by Anthony Van
Dyck, and the Watteau pleats of the robe are called after their
appearance in the portraits of Antoine Watteau.
Similarly,
terms may be applied ahistorically to entire categories of garments,
so that corset is applied to garments that were called stays or a
pair of bodies until the introduction of the word corset in the late
eighteenth century. And dress is now applied to any woman's
garment consisting of a bodice and skirt, although for most of
its history dress simply meant clothing, or a complete outfit of
clothing with its appropriate accessories.
A notable
trend at the turn of the twenty-first century is "cute"
short forms: camisole becomes cami, hooded sweaters or sweatshirts
become hoodies, and as of 2005, short or "shrunken"
cardigans are cardies.
The much-older
term shimmy for "slip" is most likely a false singular from chemise.
fairs
are regularly held in Milan, and it regarded by many as the 'Fashion
Capital' of the World. |
