Best Actress in a supporting gown

 

Photo by Adriano Gonçalves on Unsplash

Whenever the Academy Awards roll around, people have burning questions. 

Who will be best actor/actress? Which film will be the best picture? 

Who cares? 

We know what people are really interested in: the gowns.

In Late Latin, the word gunna meant "fur". By the 8th century this word was being used to mean a fur garment that elderly or sick monks were allowed to wear over their habits (it being pretty darn nippy getting up in the middle of the night in those chilly monasteries to sing one of the offices of the day). 

This was borrowed into Old French as goune, a word that has completely died out in French but survived in English after being borrowed in the 1300s. Originally it meant any flowing garment worn by either sex. This has survived in the scholar's gown worn as part of academic dress. 

Until the 18th century, "gown" was the ordinary name for a woman's garment, but it was then superseded by "dress", leaving "gown" to be used only for fancy dresses (or, as the OED inimitably puts it, "a dress with some pretension to elegance.")

It is somewhat ironic that "gown" is also used for that most un-fancy of attire, with no pretension to elegance whatsoever: the hospital gown. But, with news that fashion houses like Giorgio Armani have retooled their factories to make hospital attire (bravo them!), perhaps we will finally end up with elegant hospital gowns.

Copyright Katherine Barber 2012