Fashion Vocabulary: Borrowing, Adapting and Rethinking

Fashion is a rather significant mechanism that organizes the life of any society and regulates the social behavior of people. It subordinates not only the choice of clothing, interior, personal hygiene items, gastronomic tastes, musical preferences, but also the way of thinking, the formation of criteria for assessing the phenomena of reality. At the same time, fashion is not only a powerful social regulator, but also a significant cultural phenomenon, the study of which is of particular importance nowadays. In this context, the vocabulary of fashion is interesting, as, on the one hand, it enriches the Russian language due to the abundant borrowing of foreign words, on the other hand, it indicates how actively the Russian language adapts new names for fashion items, and demonstrates how Russian mentality and culture accept this vocabulary. In order to consider the Russian vocabulary in the sphere of “fashion” in all three aspects, it is important to trace the derivation of the lexical meaning of the denotations of the “fashion” semantic field in their connection with the historical period and the change in the native speakers’ way of thinking in different historical times of the country. To this end, it is necessary to turn to the etymology of the basic elements of the Russian wardrobe, identify their coherence with the gender of their owners and trace how this coherence has been changing over time, as well as analyze the ways of grammatical adaptation of borrowed vocabulary in the Russian language, and finally, note the functional specifics of the same lexemes in Russian and other donor languages.