Dear fashion, “Speak simply”! Not so much food, not so much words. This one should be the rule of fashion system. But the glamorous universe made of glossy magazines and sparkling alphabets is always ready to create neologisms with an international touch.
If we should list every single entry of fashion dictionary, the list could be endless. Not only words universally recognized but even many other ones created to define a new trend or to make appealing something that wasn’t so. The power of fashion lexicon is the ability to give light and voice to something dull. It’s a spotlight that decides who and what to make protagonist.
Is it enough to call something fashion to make it really cool? Probably not, but for many ninnies obsessed by the sexy charm of the label, words are enough to characterize an item or a lifestyle.
Fashion dictionary victims? Often. Every year designers and experts coin words to define the news from the catwalks or to make politically correct and socially acceptable some standards of beauty that are generally relegated out of the shining kingdom of haute couture.
Let’s think for example about the word curvy and the well-built models, let’s think about the marketing and how it approached to this new aesthetic mood. Only few years ago, these girls were called just fatso. Fashion, thanks to its verbal range, gave them liberation.
Moreover, there are also interesting lexical fusions as jeggings and jorts. The first ones are denim leggings shaped as jeans, the second one are short pants…very short and completely homemade.
You know, fashion can give also immortality. Everybody dreams the Kelly, the most famous bag by Hermès dedicated to the legendary Grace Kelly.
Made in fashion, it matters! Linguists are absorbed in studying the meaning and the mediatic impact of these words, even if the enthusiasm is not comparable to the one of crazy women at Zara at the beginning of summer sales. Could we call it technical language? Yes, at least in part. In other cases, it is only very posh and exclusive but can generate long chats about nothing. If in front of a pair of flatform that your friends have seen on Vogue worn by Cara, you feel like a Martian, don’t lose heart. Remember that fashion legitimizes, therefore if you decide to go around wearing pajamas and a coat-gown, nobody will call you shabby but shabby chic.
