Je Ne Sais Quoi

I love fashion. I've had fashion clients for years. And yet every so often I find myself banging my head on my desk over some bizarre bit of language wielded by an overreaching fashion copywriter. Last week it was the "Barren" skirt from Diane von Furstenberg. This week: two headdesk moments from the new J. Crew catalog. Naturally, the website is in the accursed Flash* so I can't show you photos here. You'll have to use the links, or your imagination.

Exhibit A: The Curator pant, "a work of genius [sic!] in matte jersey with an incredibly flattering [sic!] (and so chic [sic!] right now) slouchy fit that deftly [sic!] tapers to a skinny fit at the ankle." Let me be plain: That crotch is drifting dangerously southward, suggesting that the eponymous curator is wearing jumbo Depends. Even J. Crew Aficionada, usually an unabashed partisan, wrings her hands:

Call them "curator pants" all you want, but those are harem pants. No one can rock these. No one. And to call them a "work of genius" makes me really question you sometimes J.Crew. Seriously, you can do better.

Now, we know that curate is a trendy word right now. We are all curators in the fabulous galleries of our lives, are we not? But this particular appropriation is just inartful.

(I know someone is going to point out that it should be pants, not pant. Well, obviously Someone isn't fluent in Retailese. What we have here is the Fashion Singular, a grammatical number familiar to readers of Vogue and watchers of What Not to Wear. Sample sentences: "We love a platform shoe!" "Yes, you can wear the new romper!" "The sequined short: Hot or not?")

Exhibit B: The Suckered Gingham Shirt. Now, you may assume that the name was taken from the customer's suspicion that she's being duped into paying $69.50 for an item of clothing that looks like it's spent the last month balled up in the back of a drawer. But what J. Crew has in mind is an oh-so-chic (and oh-so-wrong) verbification-truncation of seersucker, which is a noun borrowed from Hindi sīrsakar (which in turn was borrowed from Persian shīroshakar). The word literally means "milk and sugar," and it refers to the bumpy texture of the cloth. There is no process called suckering. I could have tolerated "puckered"—which is, in fact, the descriptor used in the copy. But I will not be suckered into suckered.

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* That link goes to a post about the use of the accursed Flash by restaurants, but it holds for fashion sites as well—indeed, for almost all websites.

Comments

[Neal Whitman]

Just as I thought: The quote about curator pants confirms that simply wearing something does not mean you're "rocking" it. To rock it, you have to look good in it.

[Jessica]

In my family, the nickname for pants like the Curator Pant is "load pants" - as in you look like you have a load in them. "Incredibly flattering"? Nope.

[panavia999]

My first thought was crappy capris. Hey.. Crapris!

[Duchesse]

In a boutique, I was informed that
"our suiting is hanging over there." And Nancy, the use of wardrobe as a verb makes me wild.

One of my favourite comedy skits of all time was a one-legged man hopping into a tailo"r's asking for "a pant". "You mean 'pants'?" NO, I said 'a pant'."

[Nick]

I agree "suckered" for the name of a shirt is awful. When I checked,("looked", not the pattern) I found not only the shirt, which I like , but this bit of information, "Designed with impeccable detail." What does this mean? Are all the little pucks/sucks exactly the same size? Is this shirt wrinkly in just the right places? Let's send it to L.L.Bean for field testing.

[mike]

As an aside, a hacky but functional way to get an image out of an accursed Flash presentation is to capture the whole screen (Alt+PrtScrn in Windows, dunno wot on the Mac), paste into Paint, crop, save. (This is actually easier now in Windows 7, but I'm so used to the old way that I still do this.)

As I say, hacky, but if there's sufficient motivation -- including the motivation to get around Flash, heh -- it can be done.

[Katie]

As a curator myself (for an actual museum to boot, and not just my life), I can't think of a single instance in which those pants would be appropriate. I suspect I'll pass.