Clothing terminology comprises the names of individual garments and classes of garments, but also specialized dictionaries stores are designed, manufactured, marketed and sold clothes for hundreds of years.
Clothing terminology ranges from the mystical (Watchet, light blue, the name of the sixteenth century), and the everyday (t-shirt), and changes over time in response to the mode in turn is reflected in the social, artistic and political development.
Although the development of new terms by fashion designers, clothing manufacturers and marketers, the names of several basic garment classes in English is very stable over time. Suit, shirt / skirt, dress and jacket are displayed back to the Middle Ages.
gown (medieval Latin gunna) was a basic clothing term for hundreds of years, referring to the garment, hanging from your shoulders. Medieval and renaissance England gown referred to a loose outer garment worn by both men and women, sometimes short, often ankle length and sleeves. When the eighteenth-century gown had become a standard category term for the dress of the woman, which means that it will stay until mid-century. Only in recent decades has gown lost in the general sense of the dress. Today the term gown is rare in specialized cases: academic dress or cap and gown, evening gown, nightgown, hospital gown, and so on (see the dress).
shirt and skirt are originally the same word, the first and last in the south of North pronunciation at the beginning of Middle English. If the suit, shirt is becoming a specialized term in Britain, but it retains its general meaning in the United States (see shirt).
Coat remains a term garment, the essential role in the past thousand years (see Coat).
Names for new styles and fashion clothing are often deliberate inventions of fashion designers and clothing manufacturers including Chanel Little Black Dress (a term which has survived) and Lanvin’s robe the style (which is not). Other terms are more obscure origin.
Clothing styles are often named after people? Often the military connection:
Garibaldi jacket and Garibaldi shirt were bright red woolen garments for women black embroidery or braid and military information about popular in the 1860s, they were named after the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, who visited England in 1863.
Eisenhower jacket or “Ike” jacket with waist length jacket with army in World War II origin. The “Jacket, Field, Wool, M-1944,” is ordered, General Dwight Eisenhower as a new field jacket for U.S. forces in northern Europe. Jacket is based on the British Army, “Battle Dress jacket from the same period.
Vest is a knitted jacket or button-front shirt is made to the British soldiers to keep warm in the Russian winter. It is named after James Brudenell , 7th Earl of Cardigan, the Charge of the Light Brigade, led during the Crimean War (1854).
Mao jacket is very clear (often gray), high collar shirt like jacket normally worn by Mao Zedong and the Chinese people in his administration. The bad planning and uniformity was a reaction to pre-Revolution class distinctions of dress and elite development of the silk dress, while the poor workers used a very coarse clothes.
Nehru jacket is a uniform jacket without lapels or collars, popularized Jawaharial Nehru, first Prime Minister of independent India.
Another fertile source of clothing is a relation of place, which usually reflect the origin (or supposed origin) of fashion. modern terms as Bermuda shorts, Hawaiian shirts and Fair Isle sweaters are the latest in a long line that goes back to the Netherlands (linen), damask (“Damascus”), polonaise (“the fashion of Polish women”), jersey (originally Jersey dress), Balaclava, Mantua, and denim (“the Serge to the city).
Costume historians, a “backward looking” approach requires the names of clothing styles that are not used (or, if necessary), the styles are really worn. For example: Van Dyke collar is what is known of his performances in the seventeenth century portraits by Anthony Van Dyck and Watteau pleats cape named after the occurrence of portraits of Antoine Watteau.
also unhistorical terms can be applied to whole categories of clothing so that the corset is applied to apparel which was invited to stay or a couple of bodies to the introduction of the word corset is an end of the eighteenth century. And dress is now applied to every woman’s wardrobe consists of jacket and skirt, although most of its history clothes just clothes, or a complete outfit of clothing with the right accessories meant.
A major trend in the beginning of the century is “cute” short forms: Cami shirt, sweaters and sweatshirts to sweaters, and since 2005, a short or “shrunken” cardigans are cardies.
Much of the older term shimmy for “slip” is probably the wrong plug out shirt.
