Fashion Terms — the Apparel Search fashion terminology directory
This section contains concepts and terms that are of interest to members of the apparel industry, fashion industry or textile industry. The goal of this area is to provide information formatted around key topics of interest to the industry in which we work, as well as to the ultimate consumer of fashion products. On this page, you will find areas of interest that begin with the letter “Y”. Y is one of the short letters in this directory, with two entries that could hardly be more different: the yoke, a construction term for the shaped piece that carries a garment at the shoulders or hips, and yuppies and scuppies, two lifestyle labels whose spending habits left a lasting mark on fashion.
This section contains concepts and terms that we feel are of interest to members of the apparel industry, fashion industry or textile industry.
The goal of this area is to provide you with information that is formatted around key topics of interest to the industry in which we work as well as ultimate consumer of fashion products.
On this page, you will find areas of interest that begin with the letter "Y".
The two Y entries cover the two sides of this directory: how clothing is made, and how clothing is worn as a social signal. The yoke belongs to garment construction. It is a shaped pattern piece, cut to fit a part of the body closely — around the neck and shoulders on a shirt or bodice, or around the hips on a skirt — so that looser, fuller parts of the garment can hang from it with support. Because the yoke carries weight and sets the lines across the back of a shirt, its cut, and the choice between a one-piece and a split yoke, change both the look and the comfort of the finished garment. The yoke page in this section explains the construction, its nineteenth-century history, and how a shirt's yoke width is measured.
Yuppies and scuppies belong to fashion as culture. A yuppie — a young upwardly mobile professional person, in the 1980s acronym — dressed to display success: wide-shouldered power suits at work, designer labels and branded goods as status symbols, and conspicuous spending after years of recession. The scuppie, a socially conscious upwardly mobile person, kept the ambition and the taste for quality but redirected the status symbols toward responsible choices, from hybrid cars to fair-trade coffee. The yuppies and scuppies page in this section traces both labels, the power dressing that went with the first of them, and the handbook that named the second.
Every term in this directory has its own page with a definition and explanation written for the apparel, fashion and textile industries. The term list at the top of this page links to both Y entries. Readers looking for a different spelling can use the letter list below, which reaches every other letter directory, the number directory for terms that begin with a figure, and the two full directory pages that list the whole alphabet. Readers who think in subjects rather than spellings can use Fashion Terms by Category, which groups the same vocabulary around topics such as garments, fabrics and the fashion business.
The Y section has two entries: yokes, the shaped pattern pieces that fit around the neck and shoulders or around the hips of a garment, and yuppies and scuppies, the lifestyle terms for the ambitious 1980s professionals whose power dressing defined a decade and for their socially conscious successors.
Fashion vocabulary clusters under letters such as C, S and P, because most garment, fabric and construction words begin with those letters. Very few everyday apparel words begin with Y, so this directory keeps the letter honest with its two genuine entries rather than padding the list.
Use the Fashion Terms by Letter list on this page to jump to the letter the term starts with, or browse Fashion Terms by Category to find terms by subject instead of by spelling.