Word: fashionability
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that was more flamboyant than the contemporary Ivy League look yet not as loud as the psychedelic style of the same era. Before long, Lauren had 30 employees helping to promote and sell his fast-expanding Polo collection. Chic department stores like Bloomingdale's showcased his collections, and the fashion press took notice. "He's acquired a certain reputation for clothes that are, you know, with it. But not too with it. Not enough to shock the boys at the bank," wrote Fashion Critic Bernadine Morris...
...Lauren look began to catch on. The designer quickly became something of a champion for well-bred suburbanites who felt manipulated by European couturiers. "Nobody is impressed with elaborate clothes anymore," he declared in 1974. "A girl who is solid doesn't want to be known as a fashion lady." Today his quietly elegant womenswear collections bring in about $210 million at retail...
Above all, Lauren is the boss. He huddles for most of the day with fashion assistants and corporate colleagues, at one moment expostulating before a trio of dark-suited subordinates and the next pondering an advertising display among a group of young designers clad in a palette of pale blue variations on his own favorite garb. Lauren pays his employees well and rewards loyalty, but he can be a blunt taskmaster. "He is absolutely terrible about hiding his feelings," says Buffy Birrittella, Polo/Ralph Lauren's vice president for advertising and communications. In an industry notorious for its creative egos, Lauren...
...while "state-of-the-art " is such a successful three-hyphen innovation that it may be used several times a week without risking reproof from an editor. Though of lower wattage, nonhyphenated modifiers also count for something in journalese. Since "buxom blond" and "leggy redhead" are no longer in fashion, journalese has evolved alternate descriptions of females, like a "handsome woman" (virtually any female over 50) or an "attractive woman" (any woman at all). Negative journalese, a strong branch of the language, combines a complimentary word with an apparently innocent but actually murderous modifier. "She is still pretty," for instance...
...movement conservatives and their advocacy tanks have settled in around Washington, and they are getting comfortable. Meanwhile, the stolid old think tanks, which once helped to hold together the center in American politics, are trimming their moderate ways to fit the bold fashion of this decade's foundations. "What really scares me," says Historian Smith, "is that the center is in trouble. These new tanks are not looking as far ahead as these organizations did in the past. What's really in trouble is the long-term research and planning that gave our politics their pragmatic quality...