‘It’s not right, is it?’ said Veronica, pointing to a poster for H&M women’s blazers at £17.I agreed. But she meant it was not right to sell clothes for so little,if it required people abroad to work for such low wages. I meant that it was not right to call the garment a blazer.
I first noticed this puzzling extension of the use of blazer at Jack Wills, which, by its own account, ‘was launched in 1999 in Salcombe, Devon, designing British heritage-inspired goods for the university crowd’. The university crowd, was, it seems, easily persuaded to start calling woollen tweed jackets blazers.
When my husband was young, in the last century, there was a class distinction between calling a tweedy garment of this kind a sports coat (U) and a sports jacket (non-U). I’m not sure this was justified historically.
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