Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: Bikini and Beyond

Hello, summer! And hello to what the ladymags like to call “bikini season.” My new column for the Visual Thesaurus investigates how the bikini got its name (in 1946 France) and why the word has been such a productive contributor to our vocabulary.

Access is restricted to subscribers. Here’s an itsy-bitsy excerpt:

Eventually, “-kini” acquired enough independent meaning that it became detached from the concept of skimpiness. In 1985, swimsuit designer Anne Cole introduced a suit that combined a bikini-style bottom with a relatively demure, hip-length tank top. The company called it the “tankini,” a descriptor that has endured. Or consider the full-coverage Burqini: a portmanteau of “burqa” and “bikini,” it’s the registered trademark for a full-body suit—only the face and hands are revealed—introduced in 2007 by a Lebanese-Australian swimsuit designer to meet the needs of active Muslim women. The Burqini (known generically as the burkini or the veilkini) was popularized by a non-Muslim, the British celebrity chef Nigella Lawson, who told reporters she wore the garment to prevent sunburn. Also innocent (and also a trademark): Babi-kini, a U.S. company that makes wee swimsuits for infants and toddlers.

Read the rest of “Bikini and Beyond.”

Bonus link #1: My 2008 blog post on bikinis and their -kini kin.

Bonus link #2: Why do men’s magazines love flag bikinis?

 

Names in the News: Georgi & Willow

Goodwill Industries, known for its job-training programs and bare-bones thrift stores, is trying something new: a trendy, one-of-a-kind boutique in San Anselmo (Marin County). But don’t look for a Goodwill sign on the storefront: the shop will be called Georgi & Willow.

The new store will sell men’s and women’s clothing and housewares “curated” (vogue word alert!) from other Goodwill stores in the Bay Area. A message on an interior wall will let shoppers in on the store’s connection to the parent organization.

Of course, the initials of “Georgi & Willow” are another clue. But there’s more to the name story, according to the San Anselmo-Fairfax Patch:

The boutique’s title [sic] combines the names of two fictional Marin County women. … Organizers have developed an elaborate Georgi and Willow backstory, with details including how the two characters met - they became friends at a young age and went to Sir Francis Drake High School.

The Georgi & Willow Twitter profile reveals a little more about the characters (punctuation sic):

Georgi is sophisticated, well-traveled, with a dressy personal style while Willow is a natural, practical, trail lover!

The boutique concept is new, but this isn’t Goodwill’s first foray into creative naming. Back in 2007, I wrote about William Good, a joint venture between Goodwill and Nick Graham, founder of the men’s-underwear company Joe Boxer. That collaboration—which didn’t involve brick-and-mortar stores—seems to have quietly dissolved.

The Georgi & Willow name recycles a well-worn retail and fashion trend: the “X&Y” formula. I wrote about many of those compound names—Judith & Charles, Elizabeth & James, Rag & Bone, Soia & Kyo, et al.—in a May 2010 post.

In a video on the San Anselmo-Fairfax Patch site, Georgi & Willow brand director Tim Murray tells the story behind the name. 

Georgi is the glossy, sophisticated, well-traveled, beautiful woman who, frankly, other women are a little jealous of from afar, but when they meet her she's so personal [sic] she makes them feel like they're the only person in the room and they really come to lover her. She's a real people person. She cares very much about giving people second chances, which is why she is supporting the local Goodwill chapter through George & Willow. 

Willow, on the other hand, is that very practical, earthy Marin County woman who would rather be hiking on Mount Tam [Tamalpais] and gardening than doing anything else. She has her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she doesn't wear any makeup or fingernail polish, and what she really cares about is the environment.

Hat tip: Diane Fischler.

-Kini Season

In the beginning there was the bikini, which begat the monokini, the tankini, the burqini, the pubikini, and the mankini. Now meet their sister in swimwear, the nun-kini.

 

Kate Upton with Sean Hayes, Chris Diamontopoulis, and Will Sasso. Photo via The Hollywood Reporter.

The skimpy swim habit worn by Kate Upton in the recent Three Stooges film drew the ire of Catholic League president Bill Donohue, “who makes his living fecklessly complaining about cultural products we unreservedly enjoy,” according to the online publication Nerve. “The TV show never mocked nuns or showed infants urinating in the face of the Stooges,” Donohue lamented. (Note: There never was a Stooges TV show. Perhaps Donohue was thinking of Abbott and Costello.) Ms. Upton portrays one of several nuns in the film; another is played by Larry (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) David. His character is named Sister Mary-Mengele.

Donohue referred to Upton’s “nun-bikini,” but in a response to Donohue a spokesperson for 20th Century Fox, the film’s distributor, called it a “nun-kini,” using the universal suffix for any novel swim garb. “I think we did the audience a favor by letting Kate Upton wear the nun-kini rather than Larry David—it could have gone either way,” the unnamed spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter.

Speaking of babes, take a look at Babi-kini, whose tagline is “My First Bikini” and which sells teeny swimsuits for tiny tots. This one retails for $30:

 

Available in sizes small (birth to 12 months) to extra-large (5 to 6 years).

And over at TMZ, they’re celebrating “Spring-kini Season.”

 

 

For an impressively large collection of women’s-swimwear lore, see Bikini Science, whose sections include “Unitards and the -Tard Genius,” “Soutien-Gorge (the Bikini Top),” and “Bikiniology.”

You may also be interested in my original post about the -ini/-kini affix. Follow-ups here and here.

(Nun-kini story via Arnold Zwicky.)

N.R.A. Mottos Then and Now

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by a lawyer and a former New York Times reporter. “For much of its history,” writes Jill Lepore in the April 23 issue of the New Yorker, “the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting association” that supported many gun-control measures. “In 1957, when the N.R.A. moved into new headquarters,” Lepore writes, “its motto, at the building’s entrance, read, ‘Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.’ It didn’t say anything about freedom, or self-defense, or rights.”

That motto was changed in 1977 to the one the N.R.A. still uses: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” The motto is an excerpt from the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; the amendment reads in full: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The difference between 1957 and 1977, Lepore writes, was the “rights revolution”—a liberal, not a conservative, movement that sought to pursue civil rights through the courts:

In the nineteen-sixties, gun ownership as a constitutional right was less the agenda of the N.R.A. than of black nationalists. In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X said, “Article number two of the constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Establishing a constitutional right to carry a gun for the purpose of self-defense was part of the mission of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which was founded in 1966. “Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community throughout the nation,” Huey Newton said.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the N.R.A. “began advancing the argument that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to carry a gun, rather than the people’s right to form armed militias to provide for the common defense,” and describing gun-safety legislation as an attack on a constitutional right.

Read the rest of Lepore’s article, “Battleground America.”

And for additional insight into America’s obsession with guns, read “New Fashion Wrinkle: Hiding the Gun” (New York Times), about the rise of “covert fashion” designed to conceal weapons. 

What Does "Tribal" Mean?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, published today, looks at a word that I’ve been seeing a lot in fashion reporting and advertising: “tribal.” That’s “tribal” as in “tribal chic,” “tribal trend,” and “tribal style.” Or in this ad from Piperlime:

Beyond the bad pun, what does it mean? Here’s an excerpt from my column:

In past decades “tribal” styles might have been called “exotic,” “primitive,” “ethnic,” or “multicultural”—adjectives that now seem patronizing. “Tribe” and “tribal,” on the other hand, have gained status and hipness in the educated First World. Joel Kotkin’s 1994 book Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy paved the way by positing that “tribe” could be a modern, urban construct. (Kotkin’s thesis is that Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and British people are sophisticated “tribes” whose shared identity, rather than politics, contributes to their economic success.) In 2008 the influential marketing writer Seth Godin published Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, which told readers that thanks to the Internet, a tribe is any connected group of people.

The upshot: tribes are now cool. So cool that at least four marketing agencies in the US call themselves Tribe, and Tribal DDB is the name of “a digitally centric global advertising agency” that’s part of the huge DDB network.

Read the rest of “Fashion Tribes” (subscription required).

Names in the Wild: 9th Avenue, San Francisco

Magic and mystery in the Inner Sunset, near Golden Gate Park:

 

 

Misdirections is a splendid name for a magic shop: Misdirection is what gives magic tricks their magic. This particular shop not only sells cards, books, DVDs, and other paraphernalia, it also sponsors shows and lectures. I’d hoped the website would display a touch of magic—disappearing text? disembodied hands executing feats of prestidigitation?—but alas, it’s merely workmanlike. (When it works at all: the About page is missing. Maybe magic was afoot after all.)

*

Right next door to Misdirections is this mysterious sign:

 

 

The symbol is a pilcrow, which is a clue to the store’s name:

 

I’m not sure what the name Paragraph has to do with clothing—elements of style, perhaps? One clever Yelp reviewer said the store “is punctuated just right,” so maybe that has something to do with it. I did recognize “Paragraph” as belonging to the Writer’s Workshop school of retail and fashion naming, a trend I’ve been noticing in various quarters. For example, Nordstrom has a department called Narrative (“polished, casual styles and brands”), and Sears sells clothing with the Apostrophe private label (not sure whether it’s the punctuation symbol or the figure of speech). In the UK there’s an Eileen Fisher-style brand called Poetry*; I suppose when you wear the clothes it’s Poetry in motion.

There’s even a brand, exclusive to the Anthropologie chain, called Pilcro, a variant spelling of Pilcrow. (Its original name was Pilcro and the Letterpress.) Pilcro makes a halfhearted effort to follow through on the theme: there are denim styles called Edit and Stet (editing jargon for “leave it as is,” which may refer to the adjustable cuff), and an ankle-length linen-and cotton trouser called Hyphen. I’ve written previously about Anthropologie’s naming conventions here and here.

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* Thanks to Passage des Perles for informing me of this brand.

DKNY? LOL!

So I’m browsing the accessories section at the Nordstrom Rack in San Francisco and I see a display of handbags with a “DKNY” sign on top. Naturally, I expect the merchandise in the display to be from Donna Karan New York.

 

 

Surprise! Those bags in the foreground? They all had this tag:

 

KDNY by Kelsi Dagger. For the dyslexic fashionista?

 

Yes, it’s the 2012 version of Donna Karan’s nightmare.

The difference between DKNY and KDNY isn’t just the order of the initials. DKNY handbags are leather; KDNY’s are “pleather” (technically PU, short for polyurethane). A DKNY bag retails for $300 to $400; a KDNY bag costs about $100.

There are 42 live trademarks for DKNY in the USPTO database, zero for KDNY.

Of course, there are times when you might prefer an inexpensive plastic bag, as my Twitter friend Kevin pointed out.

 

 

Word of the Week: Minaudière

Minaudière: A small, hard-sided, often bejeweled evening bag meant to be carried in the hand. Pronounced min-oh-dee-AIR. From the French adjective meaning “affected” or “coquettish”; from the verb minauder, “to simper.”*

 

Genie lamp minaudière by Judith Leiber,  3 1/4"H x 5 3/4"W x 1 1/2"D. Covered in Austrian crystals and tiger-eye cabochons, it retails for $5,995 at Neiman Marcus.

The minaudière was invented and named around 1930 by the jewelers Van Cleef & Arpels. Here’s how Antique Jewelry University tells the story:

The minaudière is a type of vanity case. Constructed from gold or silver, it takes the form of a box. When opened, it reveals various lady-like essentials: a comb, a case for lipstick, a lighter, small compartments for cigarettes, change, and powder. The inspiration for the design came from a friend and client: Frances Gould, wife of American railroader Jay Gould. Gould apparently rushed to a meeting with Charles Arpels, throwing her necessities into a tin Lucky Strike cigarette case. Arpels took the idea and made it his own. He named it for his wife. The French verb minauder means, roughly, to simper or smile coyly. Madame Van Cleef’s simpering, especially at parties, was famous.

If the story’s true, it would be a rather backhanded tribute. (And there’s something wrong with the names. Charles Arpels was a founder, in 1896, of Van Cleef & Arpels with his brother-in-law Alfred Van Cleef; his wife would have been Mlle. Van Cleef but Mme. Arpels.)

The contemporary queen of minaudières is Judith Leiber (pronounced “Leeber”), who was born in 1921 and trained as a handbag maker in her native Budapest. She moved to New York after World War II. She made her first minaudière in 1967, when a different handbag design turned out to be poorly gold-plated; after Leiber covered it with rhinestones it became a hit with customers. Her designs are often elaborate and whimsical: dogs, birds, fish, a slice of cake. Leiber’s minaudières have been collected by museums around the world, including the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

Side view of stacked-books minaudière by Judith Leiber, about 3" x 5". Collection of FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising), New York.

“In Leiber’s world, the essentials are a handkerchief, a lipstick, and a one hundred dollar bill.” – FIDM.

Watch a short, wordless film about a minaudière with multiple marvelous compartments.

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* Totally off topic, but “simper” reminds me of “a simpering, whimpering child again” in “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” from Pal Joey. Here’s Patti LuPone singing the naughty original lyrics by Rodgers and Hart: “Horizontally speaking/He’s at his very best.”

FSHN STTMNT

Where does a style-savvy girl have to shop to buy a vowel nowadays? I’m looking at you, BLK DNM, the newish anti-fashion fashion boutique in downtown Manhattan that the New York Times profiled last week. (Reporter Jon Caramanica called BLK DNM “in essence an aggressively priced Uniqlo or Gap for the upper echelon of the invisible.”)

Is BLK DNM texting shorthand for “black denim”? Maybe. Maybe not. Urban Dictionary says “d’n’m” stands for “deep and meaningful.” Perhaps BLK stands for “bulk.” Or “blerk.” Or “bollocks.”

I’d dismiss BLK DNM as a pretentious anomaly if I hadn’t seen evidence that it is in fact part of an annoying trendlet. Let’s take a look:

• BHLDN, which I wrote about a year ago, is Anthropologie’s entry into the wedding-fashion market. As I said in the post, it begs to be backronymed. (“Beware Hardly Literate Dumb Names”?)
  
  
• Asmbly Hall, a new boutique on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, scrounged up enough cash to buy a couple of A’s, but had to cut the E (and an S) out of the budget.

 

• JNSQ, “the first independent, multimedia style magazine for iPad,” takes its name for French texting shorthand for “je ne sais quoi,” which means “I don’t know what.” How we’re supposed to pronounce the name? Moi, je ne sais pas. The online version of the company, according to a TechCrunch post, is called Jenesqua. Gen-ess-kwa? Donnez-moi un break.
  
  
• The Gap is catching the consonantal drift, too. Its new online catalog, Styld.by, “taps fashion bloggers from popular sites including FabSugar, Lookbook.nu, and Refinery29, to style and showcase pieces of Gap clothing,” according to a post on Co.Create, Fast Company’s branding/entertainment/tech blog. (The “by” in the name looks like a country code, but isn’t: the URL is www.styld-by.com. There is no .by country code … yet.) Styld.by was created by a San Francisco agency called AKQA. AKQA doesn’t stand for anything except a certain JNSQ. 

Of course, the whole thing started several years ago when tech companies like Flickr, Plnnr, and Dlvr.it (RIP) eliminated vowels to obtain short domain names. It sends one message when a scrappy startup cheats on spelling and quite another when the vowelless name belongs to an image-conscious fashion brand. By belatedly jumping on the bndwgn, are retailers trying to sell us austerity? Or are they just moving too fast to vowel up?

That Word

It does not mean what they think it means.

Liquid Gold Twined Necklace by Alexis Bittar, from alexisbittar.com.

Jack the Ripper was infamous. Bernie Madoff is infamous. Alexis Bittar—a charming and talented jewelry designer whom I once met at a Saks Fifth Avenue trunk show—is not infamous. What he is is famous (First Lady Michelle Obama is a fan) if not yet quite a household word.

The Bittar copywriter made a surprisingly common error: assuming that the addition of in- to famous would create a superlative meaning “intensely famous.”* As I wrote in a May 2008 post, infamous is never a favorable word; it means “notorious, ill-famed, having an exceedingly bad reputation.” In legal contexts, it may mean:

a. Punishable by severe measures, such as death, long imprisonment, or loss of civil rights.

b. Convicted of a crime, such as treason or felony, that carries such a punishment.

And speaking of treason, I’d also have suggested a substitute for treacherously in the second sentence of the necklace copy. The word means “hazardously” or “in a manner capable of betrayal”; in this context it suggests, all too unpleasantly, “puncture of the carotid artery by means of pointy costume jewelry.” I think what’s intended here is something closer to “enticingly” or “thrillingly.” Or maybe the little daggers “quiver” from pendants, suggesting not only their delicacy but their resemblance to arrows.

UPDATED at commenter Elisa’s suggestion:

 

More words in the That Word series: shrinkage, cliché, arriviste, bupkus, unrequited, sophistry.

 

* Likewise, some people seem to think that penultimate means “the pinnacle of ultimate,” when in fact it means “next to last.”

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Yes, the “That Word” reference is to The Princess Bride, which turns 25 this year. Inconceivable!