Fashion and clothing
Garments named after the people who wore them, the places they came from, or the fabric they were cut from.
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- Cardigan
The cardigan sweater is named for James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, the British cavalry officer who led the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava in 1854 — an assault into direct Russian artillery fire caused by a badly garbled…
From the Sat, Aug 15, 2026 roundup → - Cravat
In 1660, a regiment of Croatian mercenaries serving the French crown arrived wearing distinctive knotted scarves, and French courtiers were charmed enough to start imitating them. The garment got nicknamed after the soldiers' nationality, "Croat," which…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Denim
"Denim" gets its name from a French phrase, serge de Nîmes — literally "serge fabric of Nîmes," the southern French city where a particular sturdy twill was originally woven. The phrase got clipped down to just "denim" once the fabric crossed into English…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup → - Earmuffs
Fifteen-year-old Chester Greenwood built himself a wire-and-fur contraption in 1873 after getting fed up with cold ears while ice skating on a Maine pond, refined the design over the next few years, and received a patent for "earmuffs" in 1877 at age 18. His…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Escape
Vulgar Latin "excappare" is literally "out of the cape": to slip free of your cloak and leave your pursuer holding it. The image is of a captive wriggling out of a garment someone has grabbed. French wore it down to "eschaper," and "escape" reached English…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Espadrille
The rope-soled shoe takes its name from the Catalan word espardenya, itself rooted in espart, the tough esparto grass its sole was traditionally woven from. "Espadrilles" have been worn in the Pyrenees for centuries, long before they became a summer wardrobe…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Fedora
The fedora is named after a play, not a person — Fédora, an 1882 melodrama by Victorien Sardou that made Sarah Bernhardt, already the biggest stage star in France, into a full-blown sensation. Everything associated with the show became fashionable overnight…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Gucci
As a teenager in the 1890s, Guccio Gucci left Florence for London, where he worked as a porter at the Savoy Hotel, hauling the trunks and cases of wealthy guests and absorbing an education in what elegant luggage was supposed to look like. He returned home…
From the Sat, Sep 19, 2026 roundup → - Khaki
"Khaki" simply means "dust-colored," from a South Asian word for dust that entered English through the British Indian Army in the 1840s. British officers, tired of their bright white uniforms making them highly visible targets, began dyeing their cottons with…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Lavalier
The small microphone that clips to a collar or hangs around the neck borrows its name from Louise de La Vallière, a mistress of King Louis XIV in the 1660s who was known for her elegant pendant necklaces. Her name attached itself to that style of jewelry for…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Leotard
Jules Léotard was a 19th-century French acrobat credited with popularizing the flying trapeze act, performing his death-defying routine in a snug, one-piece garment of his own design that let him move freely without extra fabric catching on the equipment. He…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Levi's
On May 20, 1873, San Francisco dry-goods merchant Levi Strauss and Reno tailor Jacob Davis received a joint patent for reinforcing work pants with copper rivets at stress points — an idea Davis had come up with after noticing spare rivets lying around his…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Limousine
According to the most commonly told (if slightly disputed) explanation, "limousine" comes from Limousin, a rural region in central France whose shepherds traditionally wore long, hooded cloaks to stay warm and dry. Early enclosed automobiles, with their…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Lycra
DuPont chemists coined "Lycra" in the late 1950s as a completely invented word with no etymological meaning at all — the company had a long habit of generating brand-new, easy-to-pronounce, trademark-friendly names (see also: nylon, Teflon) rather than…
From the Mon, Aug 24, 2026 roundup → - Mauve
During his 1856 Easter break from London's Royal College of Chemistry, 18-year-old William Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine from coal-tar aniline, hoping to ease Britain's dependence on imported anti-malarial drugs. Instead, oxidizing the aniline left…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Negligee
A "negligee" takes its name directly from the French négligée, "neglected" or "carelessly done" — the feminine past participle of négliger, "to neglect." It originally described an entire genre of deliberately unstructured, informal at-home dress in…
From the Sat, Aug 22, 2026 roundup → - New Balance
William J. Riley, an Irish immigrant in Boston, founded the "New Balance" Arch Support Company in 1906 to make flexible inserts for people who stood all day. Company lore holds that he designed the three-point support after watching chickens in his yard…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Pajamas
Before they were sleepwear, "pajamas" were just loose, drawstring trousers worn across South Asia, adapted from Hindi and Urdu. British colonists adopted the garment as comfortable at-home wear, brought the word home with them, and English eventually narrowed…
From the Fri, Sep 11, 2026 roundup → - Parka
The hooded, fur-lined parka traces to a Nenets word from Siberia's Ural region meaning "animal skin," which reached English by way of Aleut and Russian. Some etymologists route it the other direction — Aleut into Russian rather than Nenets into Aleut — but…
From the Sat, Aug 8, 2026 roundup → - Raglan
A "raglan sleeve" — cut in one diagonal piece running from the underarm up to the collar, instead of stitched in at the shoulder — is named for FitzRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, a British army commander who lost his right arm at the Battle of Waterloo in…
From the Sat, Aug 29, 2026 roundup → - Rayon
Manufacturers had been selling regenerated cellulose fiber as "artificial silk" since the 1880s, and the name made it sound like a knockoff. In 1924 the National Retail Dry Goods Association convened a committee to find a better one. "Glos" was proposed and…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Sideburns
Ambrose Burnside, a Civil War Union general, wore a facial hair style so distinctive that people started calling the style "burnsides" after him. Somewhere along the way the two halves of the word swapped places, and "sideburns" stuck instead, an…
From the Wed, Sep 9, 2026 roundup → - Stetson
In 1865, hatmaker John B. Stetson — who'd headed to the Colorado frontier hoping the dry air would help his health — noticed that nothing on the market actually suited the punishing conditions cowboys worked in, so he designed a wide-brimmed, waterproof felt…
From the Sun, Aug 30, 2026 roundup → - Tattoo
The word "tattoo" entered English through Captain James Cook's 1769 journal, describing what he saw during his first visit to Tahiti. It's a direct borrowing from the Polynesian word for the tapping sound made by the traditional tool used to apply the ink —…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Tawdry
Saint Æthelthryth — usually shortened to Audrey — was a 7th-century English queen who died of a throat tumor she reportedly blamed on the extravagant jeweled necklaces she'd worn as a vain young woman. An annual fair held in her honor at Ely sold cheap lace…
From the Sun, Aug 16, 2026 roundup → - Tommy Hilfiger
In 1985, with almost every dollar he could raise, a largely unknown Tommy Hilfiger bought a massive Times Square billboard listing "the 4 Great American Designers for Men": Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis — and Hilfiger himself, a man virtually nobody…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Trench coat
Burberry and Aquascutum have argued for a century over who invented the "trench coat," and both have a case: Aquascutum was waterproofing wool in the 1850s, and Thomas Burberry patented gabardine in 1879 and a belted officer's coat in 1912. What's certain is…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Tulip
Persian "dulband" is a turban, and Turkish speakers used a form of the word, "tülbent," for the flower whose opened bloom looked like one. The Flemish diplomat Ogier de Busbecq, sent to the Ottoman court in 1554, recorded the name in his letters home, and the…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Tumi
Founder Charlie Clifford named his 1975 luggage company after a figure from Peruvian Pre-Columbian iconography, encountered during his two years in Peru as part of an experimental Peace Corps MBA program. Tumi is more precisely the name of a ceremonial Andean…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Tuxedo
The tuxedo traces to the Tuxedo Club, founded in 1886 by tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV in Tuxedo Park, New York. Members had copied a shorter, more casual dinner jacket they'd seen in England and started wearing it to informal dinners at the club. As the…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Ugg boots
Sheepskin boots have been worn informally by Australian surfers and shearers since at least the 1930s, under a name whose own origin nobody wrote down at the time, though the leading guess is that it is simply short for "ugly." A handful of small Australian…
From the Fri, Sep 18, 2026 roundup → - Umbrella
An "umbrella" is, at its linguistic root, just a portable patch of shade — the word traces through Italian ombrello back to the Latin umbra, "shadow." That origin lines up with how the device was mostly used around the Mediterranean for centuries: blocking…
From the Mon, Aug 17, 2026 roundup → - Under Armour
Kevin Plank, a special-teams captain on the University of Maryland football team in the mid-1990s, was tired of soaking through the cotton T-shirts he wore under his pads at every practice, and started experimenting with the moisture-wicking synthetic fabrics…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Wristwatch
Men carried pocket watches and women wore watches on bracelets, and that was the rule until the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont told his friend Louis Cartier that fishing a watch out of his pocket mid-flight was impossible. Cartier's 1904 answer, a…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup →