Colour terms in fashion

The object of this study is an analysis of the lexical means employed in the naming of colors, focusing especially on the form, function, and meaning of these color terms in the German language. Fashion magazines were used as source material for the research. The choice of magazines was determined by the high frequency of color terms. The basic color terms proved to be the most frequently exploited lexical means to describe one color, although it had been hypothetically assumed that there would be a quantitative preponderance of word formation structures, syntactic groups, and transferred designations. The decisive factor in the high frequency of basic color terms is their ability to function in a variety of ways. Not only as they describe a particular color of a garment, they are also increasingly used to express prediction and color trends, which is achieved by nominalization. But the goal has not always been a denotative correctness – rather the conveying of positive connotation.