what's in a name?

For this posting, I'm going to start considering names for my magazine project. Mrs. Stoklosa informed us as to the importance of a name that's catchy and interesting. But it's also important to have a name that'll be easily recognizable as part of the genre since this is intended to be a new magazine. So, to begin with my research I looked at other magazines within my genre. 

There are magazines that seem to be more clearly linked to fashion through names, such as (obviously) Fashion, InStyle and Vanity Fair. However, there are magazines that are more obscure with their titles. Some of these include Lucky, Nylon and No Tofu.

Now the question is, what marks this distinction? And what effect does it have on the magazine brand itself? Well, there's an article from Flipboard that advises as to how to best name a magazine. One of the important pieces of advice mentioned is the importance of having a title with a meaning that is funny or eye-catching. However, it is also important to make sure the name does not exclude or offend anyone. This matters because the magazine is hoping to reach a large audience of all kinds of people.

Another suggestion of the article is to utilize figurative language strategies to interest a possible reader. Such as allusion, hyperbole, idioms, onomatopoeia, or puns. One of the strategies that I found interesting was called portmanteau, which is the blending of two words to make one. Another one was malapropism, which is utilizing a word that sounds similar to the one typically used in a phrase. 

Apart from this, the magazine provides the advice of using the tagline of the magazine to further clarify the meaning if it is not immediately clear. And in addition to this, finding a vocabulary that is related to your meaning or paying attention to Latin roots may also be helpful. So based off of this advice, I decided to look for synonyms of fashion words. This was a strategy used by Vogue, as this word is a synonym of fashion relating to the fashion popular at a given time or period. 

As for my own search, some words I found were the following:

• fad
• form
• look
• mode
• model
• pattern
• shape
• thing
• tone
• trend
• appearance
• bandwagon
• chic
• configuration
• convention
• craze
• cry
• cultism
• cultus
• custom
• cut
• figure
• furor
• latest
• line
• make
• mold
• rage
• usage
• vogue
• dernier cri
• faddism

from Thesaurus.com. 

From this list, I really liked mode, chic, and craze. Mode has been used before, and chic has been used for a Spanish magazine, but currently doesn't have English connections. 

I also decided to take a look at words in other languages, especially Italian and French since these are two languages with popular involvement and influence in the fashion industry. In Italian, I found the words stile, modello, classe, moda and alta moda or alla moda. In French, I found the words mode, stylisme, à la mode, and sens de la mode.

Overall, this research has been very helpful and I believe that from all of these words I'll be able to find a fitting title for the magazine. I am very interested especially in the Italian words that I found.