Women's Clothes Guide N

Welcome to the N section of the Women's Clothes Guide. This page lists every women's clothing, footwear and accessories topic in the guide that starts with the letter N — thirteen guides, organized below in alphabetical order. N is a letter of contrasts: it opens with sleep, moves through work and care, and ends with the most consequential synthetic fiber in fashion history.

The thirteen guides fall into natural families. Three are for the night, two are for fun, one is for the job site, five serve nurses and nursing mothers, and the last two belong to nylon — the fiber whose stockings caused queues around the block in 1940. If you know other women's apparel categories beginning with N that should be listed here, we would be glad to hear the suggestion.

The Night Trio

Sleep in N comes three ways. The nightdress guide explains the category word itself — the dress-shaped garment also called a nightgown or nightie — and sorts out how it differs from pajamas and nightshirts. The nightgowns guide takes the garment itself: its fabrics (cotton, silk, satin, nylon), its lace and embroidery, and its ladder of lengths from nightie to full-length gown. And the night shirts guide covers the shirt-shaped branch, borrowed from menswear tailoring: button fronts, henley plackets and the great flannel nightshirt.

Novelty, and a Boot for Work

The novelty pair is fashion's sense of humor. Novelty socks are bright designs, funny text and licensed characters worn secretly in a shoe; novelty t-shirts are the same impulse worn publicly — graphics, slogans, movie and band licenses, and the occasion tee. Beside them stands the letter's one piece of heavy equipment: non-safety work boots, the soft-toe work boot, explained against its steel-toe sibling — which jobs need the protection, and which jobs are better served by the lighter boot.

Nurses and Nursing: Five Guides

Five N guides dress the people who dress our wounds. Nurse scrubs covers the sanitary working clothes of health care, from the ‘scrubbing in’ origin of the name to modern stretch fabrics and department color codes. Nurse shoes are the equipment under them: clogs and athletic styles built for twelve-hour shifts. Nurse uniforms covers the modern uniform system and its dress codes, while nursing uniforms keeps the traditional garment — the white dress, pinafore apron and cap descended from the nun's habit. And nursing bras is a strictly practical guide to the drop-cup bra: mechanisms, fabrics, and fitting a body that changes size by the week.

The Nylon Pair

The last two guides live in their own nylon section, and they bookend the fiber's fashion career. Nylon tights tells the 1940 story — DuPont, the World's Fair, 64 million pairs in a year — and explains the denier scale from ultra-sheer to opaque, runs included. Nylon handbags shows where the fiber went next: the lightweight, weatherproof working bag. Every N guide follows the pattern of the rest of this directory: what the garment is, how it is made, how to choose and fit it, and how to care for it — and the alphabet bar below reaches every other letter of the Women's Clothes Guide, from A to Z.

Browse by the chip grid for the fastest route to a topic, use the alphabet bar to jump letters, or start with whichever family matches your need tonight: something to sleep in, something to smile in, something to work in, or something in nylon. Each guide stands on its own, and each links onward to its nearest relatives.