From marabù to bodysuit: «Vogue Italia» and the fashion language

di Giuseppe Sergio
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 50 (2015), p. 97

This essay aims at highlighting the language of fashion as presented in «Vogue Italia», which is probably the most important Italian fashion magazine today. After a short history of the magazine, the essay compares two corpora of articles taken from «Vogue Italia»: the first one from the magazine’s first decade (i.e. 1965-1975), the second one from the decade 2002-2012. The comparison points out different textual approaches, going from openly advisory to denotative, and syntactical constructions, in the direction of a terse style. But the essay especially focuses on the fashion lexicon, characterized by words coming from French and, increasingly, from English; by neologisms, which point out the role of «Vogue Italia» in innovating and spreading fashion language; and, finally, by compounds and derivatives, showing the strong but decreasing power of the Italian language to create new technical words. Keywords: Italian, fashion language, fashion magazines, loanword, neologism, word formation