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Clothing
Terminology - Definition of
Clothing
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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. Categories of clothing terminologyAt its broadest, clothing terminology may be said to include names for:
Persistence of clothing terminology
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 retained only in specialized cases: academic dress or cap and gown, evening gown, nightgown, hospital gown, and so on. Shirt and skirt are originally the same word, the former being the southern and the latter the northern pronunication 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). | ||||||||
Sources of new terminologyNames 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. Personal namesClothing styles are frequently named
after people
Short formsA notable trend at the turn of the twenty-first century is "cute" short forms: camisole becomes cami, hooded sweaters or sweatshirts become hoodies. The much-older term shimmy for "slip" is most likely a false singular from chemise. ReferencesPicken, Mary Brooks: The Fashion Dictionary, Funk and Wagnalls, 1957. (1973 edition ISBN 0308100522)
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