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English Vocabulary: Fashion Week

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Melanie

English Vocabulary: Fashion Week

February 16, 2010 by Melanie

This lesson uses fashion vocabulary in context to help you understand when and how to use all these different words related to fashion week and fashion shows!

 

(Photo by theredproject)

 

Fashion week is a semiannual event – it happens twice a year. In February and March, designers showcase their fall/winter collections; in September and October, they showcase their spring/summer collections (for the following year). Fashion weeks take place all over the world, but the most important ones take place in the four major fashion capitals of the world: New York City, London, Milan, and Paris.

The first fashion week always take place in New York City. For one week, hundreds of American fashion designers showcase their ready-to-wear collections. It is a week packed full of fashion shows. This is a huge event in the fashion industry because it is the first time fashion magazine editors, critics, buyers (the people who decide what to sell in stores), and the public will get a chance to see the new clothing and the latest trends for fall.

A collection is all the new clothes the designer has made for that season. Each designer promotes his/her collection with a fashion show. During the fashion show, models walk down the runway wearing the new clothing (a runway is also known as a catwalk). Usually, a designer likes to have a supermodel walk the runway. A supermodel is someone like Kate Moss, Gisele Bündchen, or Heidi Klum – a very well-known and sought after model. Past supermodels include women like Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Claudia Schiffer.

Ready-to-wear clothing is clothing that you can walk into a store and buy right off the rack. You can wear it as soon as you buy it. This is different from haute couture clothing (a French expression meaning ‘high fashion’). Couture is expensive, custom-made, one-of-a-kind clothing. You can’t walk into a store and buy a couture dress. Paris, France is the centre of haute couture.

A fashion brand is something like H&M, Levi’s, Gap, Kookai, Zara, Polo (by Ralph Lauren), Chanel, DKNY, Burberry, or Lacoste. They design and make clothing to sell in their own stores or boutiques and department stores.

A fashion designer is someone who designs clothing, like Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Zac Posen, Stella McCartney, or Vera Wang. Their clothing is sometimes sold in their own stores, but usually their clothing is sold in boutiquesand department stores.

A fashion house is a company like Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, or Burberry. They are fashion brands, but they usually specialize in expensive, luxury clothing and other products (like cosmetics, perfume, or shoes). They have been in business for decades – some for over 100 years – and they have usually employed several designers throughout their history. For example, Karl Lagerfeld is a well-known fashion designer who designed clothing for Chanel, a famous French fashion house.

Are you a fashionista? A fashionista is a slang word for people who love fashion. A fashionista can be a fashion designer, magazine editor, or simply someone who loves to wear the latest fashionable clothing!

 

Filed Under: Blog, Vocabulary Tagged With: fashion

Comments

  1. Indigreide Vicente says

    June 17, 2012 at 11:29 am

    Hi, teacher Melanie I loved this article about fashion, I’ve learnt a lot with it. Thanks!
    Indi
    from Brazil.

  2. Sílvio B Passos says

    August 19, 2012 at 12:41 pm

    Dear Melanie
    Nice to meet your site: it looks very fine for an intermediary student of English language like me. Here, in Rio de Janeiro, people love fashion weeks, which have taken place here for years. And so this lesson will help me a lot to understand the reports on international fashion TV programmes.
    Thanks you so much,

    Sílvio
    from Brazil

  3. olivia says

    March 23, 2013 at 6:22 pm

    Dear Melanie,

    Your blog is great and helped me in so many ways. One of my friends just asked me to explain some fashion terms to her students and I didn’t know how, so I started looking online and i found your blog. Thank you so much.
    Olivia from Ecuador

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