French Fashion Vocabulary: 150 Flashcards from Haute Couture to the Fitting Room

French gave the world the words haute couture, prêt-à-porter and chic, so fashion is one of the easiest vocabulary fields to start in, and one of the easiest to get subtly wrong. Deck CT8503 – French Fashion & Style on Flip It has 150 English→French cards, from the runway to the fitting room to the Revolution's bonnet phrygien.

A sample from the deck

The vocabulary, block by block

• Industry: la mode, maison de couture, créateur de mode, couturier, semaine de la mode, tendance, saison, luxe, raffinement.
• Clothes: robe de soirée, costume, tailleur, smoking, veste, blouson, manteau, chemisier, chemise, jupe, pantalon, pull, gilet.
• Accessories: écharpe, foulard, béret, gants, ceinture, cravate, escarpins, bottes, sac à main, collier, boucles d'oreilles, bague, montre, lunettes de soleil.
• Fabrics and details: soie, coton, laine, lin, velours, dentelle, cuir, fourrure, brocart, cachemire, rayures, imprimé, ourlet, manche, col, broderie, paillettes.
• Shopping: grand magasin, essayer, trop grand, trop petit, soldes, bon marché, cher.
• Culture: Chanel, Dior's New Look (1947), Hermès, Lagerfeld, avenue Montaigne, le Marais, Belle Époque, sans-culottes, cocarde tricolore, Côte d'Azur.

Study tips specific to this deck

Skip the 47 mirror cards. Almost a third of the deck has an identical front and back: every brand (Chanel to Céline), every designer, Paris, Cannes, Nice, Vogue, Elle, Rococo, Glamour, Chic, Satin. They test nothing. Suspend them, or rewrite a few as real questions (Which house launched the New Look in 1947? Dior). Your effort belongs to the roughly 100 cards where French differs from English.

Add the gender, it is absent. Only la mode and le style carry an article. Write it on every noun you learn, especially the traps: un mannequin is always masculine, even for a woman; la veste but le blouson; une robe, un costume. Without the article you cannot say ta robe est belle correctly.

Watch four traps. Taille answers both card 78 (waist) and card 93 (size): learn quelle est votre taille ? as a phrase. Couture alone is a seam (card 85); the fashion sense needs haute couture. A French blouse is mostly a smock or lab coat; the English blouse is un chemisier. And sales are plural: les soldes (card 98 says « Solde »). Also note that chandail (card 31) is the Québec word; in France say un pull. For to fit, learn the whole frame: ça te va bien.

Keep going in French

Pair these clothes with the shops, numbers and prices of our French travel and daily life guide, then check more look-alikes in our French false friends article.

Search CT8503 in the Flip It library to start.