The people who brought us jeggings, skorts and coatigans have decided the letter S is no longer fashionable
I love fashion. I mean really love it. I can become obsessive about the cut of an ankle boot, I dream of one day hunting down the perfect silk blouse in just the right shade of oyster, and I devour fashion magazines – well, as if they’re going out of fashion.
However, while I enjoy looking at the lovely shiny pages showing lovely shiny clothes, I find the language that accompanies these images equally compelling – and most peculiar.
Take the letter S, for example. In recent seasons it appears to have become redundant in the lexicon of fashion and style. It’s as if an edict has been issued from Vogue HQ banning its use.
In fact the plural is now more last season than a floral maxidress. The likes of Anna Wintour and Victoria Beckham would be more likely to let a chip butty pass their lips than a rogue S.
So we now talk about a printed trouser, a heeled shoe, a nude lip, and no one bats a (smoky) eye – it’s as if we’ve collectively forgotten that, until very recently, there was an obligation to add an S to these nouns.
Why has this happened? Is it that the soft, curvaceous form of the letter S offends these rail-thin style mavens? Will they start using other letters in its place? Perhaps K or Z with their bold and angular lines will become a more fashionable choice.
Well, you may think, what’s the problem? The world of fashion is all about novelty and affectation – this won’t filter down into everyday parlance. Don’t be so sure.
The whole raison d’être of fashion is to influence – it’s why we no longer wear a boot-cut jean or a square-toed shoe (see how naturally I’m doing it). If fashion dictates that we no longer need plurals, S will be condemned to the linguistic discount bin quicker than you can say “boho-inspired-shrug”.
Planet fashion is also the spiritual home of the portmanteau word. Fashion and its inhabitants move at unrivalled pace, sped by the advent of Instagram and other social media, and merging two words into one is brilliant linguistanomics (I’m patenting that one before Grazia bags it).
I remember first reading about jeggings (jeans+leggings) in 2009. How ridiculous it sounded then, a word that conjured up images of urinary infections and squished buttocks. Four years later, the M&S website devotes an entire section to this fashion hybrid. We as a nation have embraced the jegging: the concept, the garment, but first and foremost the word.
And it doesn’t stop there: greige, skorts, coatigans, recessionistas, glunge, glamping – all these linguistic mashups began life on the pages of fashion magazines or style blogs and have since gone more mainstream than a Louboutin stiletto.
Other ubiquitous fashion words include directional (meaning grossly unflattering on anyone other than a six-foot-tall, seven-stone teenager) and “on trend”, which means, umm, ubiquitous.
I don’t blame the journalists or bloggers who pen these fashion dispatches. The real svengalis behind fashionese are the marketers. They are the ones who write the press releases and coin the buzzwords that end up on the glossy pages and blogs of the style arbiters.
I have a confession. I have played my part in the propagation of fashion speak. I worked in the murky world of fashion PR in the late 90s. It was my job to persuade fashion journalists that my client’s collection was a significant departure from their last; that they had captured the essence of the cultural zeitgeist, simply by adding an embroidered butterfly to a cashmere sweater.
It’s then the fashion editor’s job to bring readers information on what is new and “zeitgeisty” (another perennial fave). If they don’t talk about the new, readers won’t make their weekly online pilgrimage to Asos to buy the new, and the industry will collapse upon itself.
The truth is that there is no seismic shift from season to season in fashion. Designers may come across as capricious divas, but they also have a business to run. If a particular blouse sold well for spring/summer, they’ll simply update it in a heavier fabric and a deeper colourway for fall (please note: fashionistas no longer say autumn and would never say colour without putting a “way” on the end).
So we come back to the power of language. Where fashion is concerned, the quickest way to make something seem new is to coin a new word or phrase to describe it. As Coco Chanel said: “Fashion fades. Only style remains the same” – as relevant to the written word as it is to one of Mam’Zelle’s little black jackets.
Twitter: @dinky75
via Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2013/may/10/mind-your-language-fashion-trouser
