'You can’t get a pair of shoes with different shaped heels': Sazan Barzani wears a Jeffrey Campbell shoe. Photograph: Timur Emek/Getty Images
You probably know that if fashion likes a pair of trousers, they cease being trousers and become "a trouser". But did you know that if fashion likes a pair of breasts, they become just the one: a boob? This week Tom Ford, who has some expertise in this area having built Gucci in the mid-90s at least partially on breasts and metal stilettoes, claimed "to like a natural body with a 70s-shaped boob". (The shape of a 70s boob will have to be a subject for another discussion, but I would suggest a good downward slope with some upward perk.) This follows Kate Moss's revelation about tan lines in July: "I don't mind a bikini bottom … [but] I try not to have a white boob."
Why does the fashion industry like referring to plural nouns in the singular? The regular victims of this grammatical quirk include shoes, boots, socks, earrings, dungarees and even pants. It happens to parts of clothing too -– a sleeve, a heel, "a shoulder", a phrase that proliferated in March 2009 at the time of the so-called "Balmain shoulder. Using the singular suggests particularity, implies expertise, testifies to a degree of analysis and categorisation. Someone has actually studied that shoe. If you, on the other hand, have studied shoes, you haven't specialised enough.
"Singular is one of one; it's exclusive," agrees Mandi Lennard, fashion consultant. "Plural is general, a world where anyone can join in, and the fashion set don't want that as they're brutally insecure and live in a world of one-upmanship and limited editions."
Melanie Rickey, who runs the Fashion Editor At Large blog, has a more technical explanation. "Simply, it is because the style of the item is singular. You can't get a pair of shoes with different shaped heels, and for the most part trousers have identical legs and a uniform style (that is if we ignore Dior's one-wide-leg-one-slim-leg trouser from earlier this year)."
But Claire Cowie, a lecturer in linguistics at Edinburgh University, isn't convinced by that. She points out that the essayist Joseph Addison referred to "the old British Trowser" in his 1719 Dialogue on Medals. Her colleague Lauren Hall-Lew, a lecturer in the same department, has an exciting suggestion. "This seems potentially related to the phenomenon of cattle ranchers in Arizona, who refer to cows as a mass noun rather than a plural noun," she says. In her data (from a project that ran from 2002-2004), she has come across the sentence: "We have a lot of cow this year." Which sounds very Tom Ford if you just replace the word "cow" with "boob".
"It is not clear that these uses are 'singular', exactly," she says, "rather that they're describing a category or type. I think it's the same for fashion and shoes, in that it's not the specific individual shoe that the fashion professional is interested in, but something more abstract, a particular look or style."
So perhaps the fashion singular isn't a singular at all. Either way, it seems the cattle ranchers may have got there first.
via fashion - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNERK20YKDoSYt7LjhQbJH_VKSjr7g&url=http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/shortcuts/2013/sep/18/tom-ford-fashion-singular-boob
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