Garance Dore

Last week fashion blogger Garance Dore took to her keyboard to vent a little frustration over the difficulty of writing about fashion. Not about bloggers being seen as lacking the proper background to make grounded observations about fashion, not about the unlikelihood of glossy magazines becoming redundant because of fashion blogs, but about something that magazine editors and bloggers have in common: The difficulty of writing about fashion when fresh new trends constantly demand fresh new words to describe them. Garance even posted a list of supposedly outdated words that were banned from use in one particular publication, effectively being lumped into the same category as profanities and racist slurs.

And it's not just a matter of doing justice to the clothes: When words are overused they simply lose all meaning. We're all aware of it. We don't want to tell a partner that we 'love' them if we don't really mean it, instead fumbling around for an awkward response like 'and I love spending time with you!' Even convicted serial killer Charles Manson was aware of this phenomenon:

You know, a long time ago, being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy.

And nowadays, everybody's trendy. Everybody's chic. Everybody who owns more than two pairs of shoes is a 'fashionista'. And consequently, these words have ceased to have any meaning. Using them is as bad a 'faux pas' as sporting a pair of liquid leggings worn as pants.

Susan Atkins, left, sits in a Santa Monica, Calif., courtroom Oct. 13, 1970, as Charles Manson walks in before pleas were entered for them for the 1969 killings of actress Sharon Tate and others.

Usually categorizing a word as outdated is simple: If it conjures images of neon spandex or bootleg jumpsuits, or if your mom used it in 1995 to describe an outfit that you consequently banished to the back of the closet, it's out. Sorry 'funky' and 'trendy'. Basically, if it's a word that appears under 'groovy' in a thesaurus, it's the linguistic equivalent of tucking your leggings into a pair of tube socks before calling your coffee date to make sure she's wearing the same thing but in blue.

The other obvious category is any word abbreviated, extended, or that goes against the rules of basic English in a completely non-endearing way. This includes anything ending in 'ista'. While 'fashionista' is clearly the worst offender, it faces stiff competition from 'recessionista', which I fear punishment for even typing. Well okay so I am guilty of using the latter in an article, but it was used in an entirely sardonic manner to highlight the extent to which the frugality of fashion-types has been over-emphasized by the media, alright? To this category we can also add 'must have' (food is a must have, air is a must have), 'in' and 'celeb' (besides being an atrocious non-word, why famous people are thought to have an intrinsic sense of style in the first place is entirely unsubstantiated).

Garance Dore

But then there are the words that we're all guilty of using, and not just in writing. I don't have a problem with 'vintage', which made Velour's list of banned words along with 'retro'. What else are we supposed to use: Old? Antique? I also think style icon can be acceptable if, and only if, the person being described has actually achieved a certain level of influence on the fashion world, and has never been cast in a reality television series.

I think Charles Manson had the right idea. There are still people who are legitimately crazy, simply a whole lot more who aren't. Similarly, while some people might actually feel a pure, heartfelt love for their Sam Edelman booties, there are many more who probably don't experience this exact sentiment. If a reader doesn't get a sense of why the writer feels the way they do, their response will be the same as if a salesperson told you to buy something just because it was a 'great deal': They will stop paying attention. If you can't think of a word, invent one. Just don't include the suffix 'ista'.