Introduction: style as distinctiveness

“What gives a woman style?” asks a recent New Yorker advertisement for The Power of Style, a book in “the Condé Nast Collection” (the fall collection of fashionable books, perhaps?). The ad continues:

Whatever answers the advertised book may offer to these questions, they are likely to have more to do with the fashion industry's notions of style than with a sociolinguistic definition. Still, some aspects of the conception of “style” implicit in this ad are worth the sociolinguist's attention. We ignore the everyday meanings of terminology at our peril; and style in language should not be assumed a priori to be an utterly different matter from style in other realms of life. So, if the ad's discourse represents some popular conception of style, we might draw several inferences about that conception: “style” crucially concerns distinctiveness; though it may characterize an individual, it does so only within a social framework (of witnesses who pay attention); it thus depends upon social evaluation and, perhaps, aesthetics; and it interacts with ideologized representations (the “ideal American girl”; “in fashion”).