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GRID SYSTEM When cultures throw up new words, historians can be fairly sure that they have struck on new developments.

The word ‘fashion’ gained currency in different languages during the Renaissance. Moda was adapted from Latin into Italian to convey the idea of fashionable dressing as opposed to costume, which denoted more stable customs relating to dress. In 16th-century France, the word mode began to supersede the Old French expression cointerie to mean ‘in style’. The French term was adapted in 17th-century German as à la mode. The English word ‘fashion’ came from the Latin word for ‘making’. It was first used c.1550 to refer to a temporary mode of dress in the physician Andrew Boorde’s Book of Knowledge. Boorde depicted an almost naked Englishman on a woodcut, cheerily announcing: ‘Now I will wear I cannot tell what, all fashions be pleasant to me.’ Boorde thought that the English would never be role models for other nations if they assimilated other fashions. His book was also the first in Europe to include woodcut depictions of people in different dress from across Europe. Yet the new preoccupation with fashion continent.