frippery

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   Ostentation, as in fancy clothing.

   • Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster’s daughter.
   • Well, we were probably never going to mistake Gordon Brown for a rococo dandy. Out go Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney with all their 18th century frills and fripperies, like aristocrats deported on the tumbril.
   • The frippery-filled world of fashion confounded its critics yesterday when it became sombre and serious in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the US.
2. 2

   Useless things

   Useless things; trifles.

   • [Olmsted reiterated his insistence that in Chicago] simplicity and reserve will be practiced and petty effects and frippery avoided.
   • “At any rate you see me still unmarried. I have found no time to palter with the fripperies of women.”
   • [Oscar] Pistorius's punishment for killing her [Reeva Steenkamp] that night is but a frippery when set against the burden that her bereft parents, June and Barry, must carry.
3. 3

   Cast-off clothes.

   • If thou doſt, come ouer, and but ſee our fripperie: change an olde ſhirt, for a whole ſmocke, with vs.
4. ›+ 3 more definitionsshow fewer

   1. 4

      The trade or traffic in old clothes.

   2. 5

      The place where old clothes are sold.

      • Oh, ho, Monſter: wee know what belongs to a frippery, O King Stephano.
   3. 6

      Hence

      Hence: secondhand finery; cheap and tawdry decoration; affected elegance.

      • There's my pretty darling Kate; the faſhions of the times have almoſt infected her too. By living a year or two in town, ſhe is as fond of gauze, and French frippery, as the beſt of them.
      • […] but consider I was born in the land of talisman and spell, and my childhood lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation.
      • But, there were preparations for a Festa; the pillars of stately marble were swathed in some impertinent frippery of red and yellow[…]

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