f-term - get your basics right

Ever those terms used in fashion editorials puzzled you. Did you ever wanted to know what does Empire line means or is lantern a kind of sleeve or skirt. If these fashion terms make you go mad or if you waqnted to improve your understanding of clothes than this is the section to look out for. It will be featuring terms used for fabrics, garment detailing, accessories and everyhting related to fashion and style. Let's begin with following : -

Denim & Jeans

What's denim and jeans. Most of us use the terms interchangeably. But both are not the one and same thing.

Denim Jeans

Denim: It is a twill weave cotton fabric with colored yarn (which is usually blue) in the warp and white yarn in the weft. Because of this white yarn in the weft, you can see little white spaces in between the diagonal lines of denim.

Jeans: Jeans on the other hand is also a twill weave cotton fabric but has colored yarn in both the warp and the weft. It has three harness weave and can have other variations as herringbone and chevron apart from twill.

Twill: A cloth has a twill weave if it shows a diagonal effect on the surface. The diagonal lines you see on most of the trousers and jeans are because of this weave. This weave is known to make fabric stronger and durable. Has many variations like right-hand, left-hand, broken, herringbone etc.

Warp: It is the name given to yarns which run lengthwise in a woven fabric. They must have high tensile strength as compared to weft yarns as they are under continous tension. A single warp yarn is called end.

Weft: This refers to the yarn which runs across the width of the fabric. This is also called filling because the weft yarns are used to fill the gaps created by the warp yarns. The weft yarn is also known as pick.