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Clothing terminology comprises the names of individual garments and classes of garments, as well as the specialized vocabularies of the trades that have designed, manufactured, marketed and sold clothing over hundreds of years.
Contents
Clothing terminology ranges from the arcane (watchet, a pale blue color name from the 16th century) to the everyday (t-shirt), and changes over time in response to fashion which in turn reflects social, artistic, and political trends.
Categories
At its broadest, clothing terminology may be said to include names for:
Persistence
Despite the constant introduction of new terms by fashion designers, clothing manufacturers, and marketers, the names for several basic garment classes in English are very stable over time. Gown, shirt/skirt, frock, and coat are all attested back to the early medieval period.
Gown (from Medieval Latin gunna) was a basic clothing term for hundreds of years, referring to a garment that hangs from the shoulders. In Medieval and Renaissance England gown referred to a loose outer garment worn by both men and women, sometimes short, more often ankle length, with sleeves. By the 18th century gown had become a standard category term for a women's dress, a meaning it retained until the mid-20th century. Only in the last few decades has gown lost this general meaning in favor of dress. Today the term gown is rare except in specialized cases: academic dress or cap and gown, evening gown, nightgown, hospital gown, and so on (see Gown).
Shirt and skirt are originally the same word, the former being the southern and the latter the northern pronunciation in early Middle English.
Coat remains a term for an overgarment, its essential meaning for the last thousand years (see Coat).