(already subscribe? log in).

Fleeting fashions, long-lived words

The Word

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 19, 2012|By Erin McKean

(Globe Staff Photo illustration )

Fashion Week in New York — the week when major designers show their clothes for the coming season — came to a close on Friday. As with every Fashion Week, it was all about the trends: new hemlines, sleeves, shoulders, heels, all with their own terms of art. Coverage included such terms as “bouclé parka lining,” “nip-waist suit,” and “Prince of Wales check” — and get ready for lots of shiny patent leather, evidently the new rage for fall.

It’s a truism that fashion is both always new and always recycling the old: There are only so many silhouettes and materials. That bouclé and that “Prince of Wales check” (supposedly designed for Edward VII, but popular with Edward VIII) are terms that date from the late 1800s and the 1930s, respectively. Though fashion words do come and go, we keep some filed away, like sketches in a designer’s archive, waiting for another turn on the runway.

Some of these words stay with us even though the styles they refer to will never be worn again. These words become fossils of fashion, in a way: ghostly skeletons embedded in the rock of the language. There’s the tablier (a skirt front resembling an apron) or the false engageante undersleeves, both popular in the 1850s. Engageantes were sewn to the oversleeves, not the bodice — think dickies for sleeves. (Dickies — false shirt fronts, worn under sweaters or jackets — are on their way out, if not already the stuff of historical costuming, but most fashion-conscious people still know the word.) We no longer put little boys in tight skeleton suits, their pants buttoned to their jackets under the armholes — you can imagine the rips and popped buttons needing repair daily. And despite their usefulness to “those who are obliged to walk out in all weathers,” as a 19th-century knitting book put it, very few people still wear gaiters — leather or wool coverings for the lower legs.

Some styles endure, but acquire new names, leaving the language multiply enriched as a result. We have muumuus and caftans; earlier eras called similar garments Mother Hubbards (from the nursery-rhyme character), slammerkins, and trollopees (the latter two connoting untidiness or slovenliness). There are only so many ways to cover your arms and torso with a jacket, but each version has many names. There is the jocular bum-perisher (or bum-freezer, bum-shaver, bum-starver), a coat without tails for men, and the short wool hug-me-tight for women; there is the petenlair of the 1700s, thigh-length and with elbow sleeves, and the casaquin of the late 1800s, long-waisted, and, according to a ladies’ magazine, “made of very dark, but not black, material.”