The Language of Clothing

[MacKenzie]

For my entire life blazer and sport jacket have been used interchangeably to refer to a "suit coat/jacket" that does not match the trousers.

Tan (khaki) pants & a dark blue jacket = slacks and and a blazer.

Matching pants & jacket = suit.

Matching pants, jacket & vest = three-piece suit.

[Father Bill]

For my entire life blazer and sport jacket have been used interchangeably to refer to a "suit coat/jacket" that does not match the trousers.

Have to disagree a mite. To me a blazer is one colour usually navy or black with brightly contrasting brass buttons, whereas a sport jacket can be tweed, windowpane, or other possibilities with subdued buttons.

[Bruce Scott]

Prior to reading this if you'd asked me what color khaki was I would have said, "A light tan or sand color. Unless you're from across the pond, where their khaki is what we refer to as 'OD green'."

And I have said as much many, many times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaki

Across the pond the light tan or sand colour is also known as khaki despite the woolen khaki uniforms being much darker, for example, these khaki drill shorts:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30100818

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaki_drill

[Janner52]

Prior to reading this if you'd asked me what color khaki was I would have said, "A light tan or sand color. Unless you're from across the pond, where their khaki is what we refer to as 'OD green'."

And I have said as much many, many times.

As a person from across the pond, and someone who has worn khaki (sand coloured) and olive green clothing for about 35 years I have never heard olive green referred to as khaki except in the last few years when retailers have advertised it as such. Olive green has always been referred to as such or as OG or olive drab. So I am not sure where this came from.

Whether or not this is the case in mainland Europe, or any other country,I would not know for sure.

[Janner52]

For my entire life blazer and sport jacket have been used interchangeably to refer to a "suit coat/jacket" that does not match the trousers.

Tan (khaki) pants & a dark blue jacket = slacks and and a blazer.

Matching pants & jacket = suit.

Matching pants, jacket & vest = three-piece suit.

I agree with the last two however sports jacket that originally referred to what was generally a tweed or similar looking jacket worn with plan trousers and in the day was referred to as casual wear.

A blazer was usually plain coloured, mostly navy blue, or striped and often with shiny buttons and an embroidered pocket badge.

This was the case in the UK.

[MacKenzie]

Have to disagree a mite. To me a blazer is one colour usually navy or black with brightly contrasting brass buttons, whereas a sport jacket can be tweed, windowpane, or other possibilities with subdued buttons.

Makes more sense.

Of course my only exposure to anything that could be considered "dress" clothing was Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and what my dad wore to work... until I got into JROTC. I was about as far removed from "society" as one could get.

[MacKenzie]

As a person from across the pond, and someone who has worn khaki (sand coloured) and olive green clothing for about 35 years I have never heard olive green referred to as khaki except in the last few years when retailers have advertised it as such. Olive green has always been referred to as such or as OG or olive drab. So I am not sure where this came from.

I hadn't thought about it for many years until this thread. I read, studied, absorbed everything WWII during my younger years, and I have it burned into my brain that, "The Brits call OD green khaki."

So file it as "anecdotal".

[Touchstone]

I agree with the last two however sports jacket that originally referred to what was generally a tweed or similar looking jacket worn with plan trousers and in the day was referred to as casual wear.

A blazer was usually plain coloured, mostly navy blue, or striped and often with shiny buttons and an embroidered pocket badge.

This was the case in the UK.

Quite right, technically, but MacKenzie is also correct in noting that (in the US at least) the two terms are often used interchangeably.

[Janner52]

I hadn't thought about it for many years until this thread. I read, studied, absorbed everything WWII during my younger years, and I have it burned into my brain that, "The Brits call OD green khaki."

So file it as "anecdotal".

Fair comment.

The British Army wore khaki on active service from 1902 until 1943 so I have found out. Jungle Green was then introduced, in the Far East, as khaki wasn’t suitable for the jungle environment. Presumably between the end of the war and sometime during thaw Malayan Emergency (48-61) this morphed into OG. It’s quite possible that everything was generically referred to as khaki in the early stages , especially by those outside the military. Of course it’s also quite possible that we were referring to the G.I.s wartime combat clothing as a general colour for soldiers uniforms.

[OC Richard]

Possibly my first introduction to the differences between the way we here in the US and people in England name colours was back in the early 1970s when I was watching this Monty Python sketch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riHEQ6pcxro

They're shooting a low-budget film on a beach. It's supposed to take place in the Antarctic so they've painted the sand white.

But then they decide to switch the scene's location from the Antartic to the Sahara.

"Paint the sand yellow again!" (4:02)

I had never imagined that anyone could call the colour of sand "yellow".

Around that time I got interested in Scottish military history and became familiar with the "Khaki Wool Serge" Service Dress which was introduced in 1902, in which World War One was fought.

I had never imagined that anyone could call the colour that the US Army called Olive Drab "Khaki". ("Olive Drab" was the name of the colour of the US Army wool Service Dress uniform, likewise adopted in 1902, in which we fought World War One.)

But I'd acquired 20 or 30 books about the British army, all of them written by British authors and all of them published in Britain (presumably for a British audience, they being difficult to acquire here) and they consistently used the word "Khaki" to refer to that dull slightly greenish mid-brown that we call Olive Drab.

But these books also used the word "Khaki" to refer to the colour we in the US call "Khaki", a very pale tan, or beige. The British called the cloth itself "Khaki Drill" or KD for short.

When the British Army first adopted the Officers' Khaki Wool Service Dress tunic with open collar and lapels it was worn with white shirt and black tie. But in 1913 this was changed to "Khaki shirt" and "Khaki tie".



Hold on! The tunic, shirt, and tie were three different colours! But all were called "Khaki" in the regulations.

I learned that the term "Khaki" in British military parlance (at least concerning The Great War) was far more elastic than the word "Khaki" was in the US.



I need to point out, first, that the US 1902 Service Dress was acknowledged at the time to be a copy both in style and colour of the British 1902 Service Dress (though we can see that it wasn't a very close copy).

And second, in both countries the colour varied widely, every contractor seemingly having a different shade, from a dull mid-brown without trace of green to browns with varying tinges of green.

I just now found out, through Googling, that from 1941 to 1947 the MOD used the term "Service Drab" for one specific shade of the colour that they'd been calling "Khaki" since 1902. Nevertheless, Battle Dress is pretty much universally described as "Khaki" in the British sources.

About the shirts, I found it interesting that the MOD uses the term "Stone" for the shirt-colour we in the US call "Khaki".

When I got into wearing British-made tweed jackets I quickly learned of another difference in colour terminology.

There's a colour midway between grey and brown which Americans would often call "gray" before the term "Taupe" became common. What we wouldn't call this colour is "brown". But I found that British catalogues and websites generally did call this colour "brown".

They'll also use "brown" for a colour we'd call "tan" https://www.dobell.com/harris-tweed-...eed-jacket-usa

For us "brown" has a more restricted meaning, which I've seen British sources call "Walnut".

Even this "Walnut" tweed, in some of the photos, looks a bit too tan to be called "Brown" by many Americans https://www.cathcartlondon.com/en-us...d-gable-jacket

To find colours which, if you said to somebody around here, "I mean the guy in the brown jacket" everyone would know who you meant, I found I have to search using "chocolate".

The truth is that colours exist in a continuum and each language, each dialect, draws the borders of each of their various colour-words in different places.

(Famously many languages don't have either a word for, or the concept of, the colour we call "blue".) https://gondwana-collection.com/blog...bas-see-colour