Chic

For the disco band, see CHIC (band).

Chic is a French word, established in English since at least the 1870s, that has come to mean smart or stylish. Early references in English dictionaries classified it as slang and the New Zealand-born lexicographer Eric Partridge noted, with reference to its colloquial meaning, that it was "not so used in Fr[ench]" (Dictionary of Slang and Unconvential English, several ed 1937-61). There is a similar word in German, schick, meaning tact or skill; indeed chic may be linked to the word chicane.

In 1887 The Lady noted that "the ladies of New York ... think no form of entertainment so chic as a luncheon party" (20 January 1887).

Although the French pronunciation ("sheek") is now virtually standard, chic was was often rendered in the anglicised - and distinctly un-chic - form of "chick". An example was in Simon Raven's Edward and Mrs Simpson (Thames, 1978), a television drama based on the events leading to the Abdication crisis of 1936, when the leader of the Labour Party, Clement Attlee (played by Patrick Troughton), used the word slightly contemptuously during a meeting with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (David Waller).

The Oxford Dictionary gives the comparative and superlative forms as chicer and chicest. An adverb chicly has also appeared: see, for example, Tatler, May 2006: "Pamela Gross ... turned up chicly dressed down".

The "-chic" form

Towards the end of the 20th century and in the early years of the 21st, lexicographers, such as Susie Dent in her annual Language Reports (2003-5) for the Oxford University Press, noted how "-chic", as a suffix, came to be applied to various trends in fashion.

This form can probably be traced to the term, radical chic, coined in 1970 by the American journalist Tom Wolfe (b.1930) to describe a concert given for the Black Panthers by the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. By extension this was applied more generally to the adoption of radical causes by well-to-do society figures.

Some imitative terms, such as heroin chic (the waif-like, drug addicted look of the mid 1990s associated with the model Kate Moss) and boho-chic (a "Bohemian" style popularised by actress Sienna Miller in the mid "noughties") had a significant and recognisable impact, but others were essentially the passing coinages of journalists or retailers. Some readily gave rise to puns: for example, the magazine Private Eye used the headline, "Heroin cheek", for a story about alleged corruption in relation to the smuggling of drugs (26 May 2006).

Chic to chic

Some other examples of "-chic" were:

Camilla chic: emulating the style, of which Burberry was a feature, of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who married Charles, Prince of Wales in 2005 (Dent, 2005);
coral chic: "a versatile sarong and oversized bag in this season's pink ... to hit the beach in style" (Avon brochure 9, 2006);
council house chic (Dent, 2004) or chav chic ("Chav Chic might have sunk the house of Burberry": The Times Magazine, 26 June 2005) as worn by working class "chavs" who shared Camilla's taste for Burberry check;
geek chic: "the look of a computer nerd" (Dent, 2003);
goth chic: the title of a "connoisseur's guide" by Gavin Baddeley (2002) to dark or Gothic culture;
hippie chic: similar to boho-chic (see e.g. London Evening Standard Magazine, 11 March 2005), though many of its features surfaced from time to time after the "Summer of Love" of 1967 when when hippiedom and psychedelia were at their peak;
paradise chic: coined by Marks & Spencer in 2006 for a post-boho collection: "This summer, modern classics are feminine, sophisticated and polished" (Your M&S, Summer 2006).
prairie chic: flat caps and floral dresses or aprons over jeans (see e.g. Daily Telegraph, 16 July 2003);
rich-girl chic: said to be "oozed" by a New York socialite in The Debutante Divorcée (2006), a novel by Plum Sykes whose works were sometimes described as "chic lit" (a term that discarded the final consonant in "chick lit");
satin chic: title of a song by Aliison Goldfrapp & Will Gregory (2005);
seaside chic: "stripes, shorts, suits - seaside chic for the girl in every port" (Tatler, May 2006);
shabby chic: the deliberate use of worn and shabby materials in interior design or fashion, associated particularly with the firm of that name founded in 1989 by Rachel Ashwell.

Recurring generic terms included designer chic (associated with the styles of particular coutouriers - the 1980s became known as the "designer decade") and retro-chic (adopting elements of fashion from the past: e.g. "Victorian chic", "sixties chic").