Turning the Fashionable ‘Bespoke’ on Its Head

It certainly isn’t the first fashion trend to pass me by, but I can’t quite believe I have missed what is happening with the word bespoke.

I owe my wake-up call to a friend in biotech, who texted me out of the blue: “Why is the word ‘bespoke’ in usage much these days?” My first thought upon reading the text: “It is?” (Clearly I didn’t fully take in Ben Yagoda’s post about this trendy word about a year ago.) I did a quick search of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which suggests bespoke is on the rise. I then texted another friend in biotech about how often she encounters bespoke, and she responded, “OMG, all the time.”

A check of a few standard dictionaries shows bespoke being defined as “custom-made” or “made to order,” sometimes specifying that it is typically used of clothing (e.g., bespoke suits). And now that I’m hyperaware of the word, I noticed the mention of a “bespoke suit” in the novel Crazy Rich Girlfriend, the sequel to Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians; and a few days ago a colleague referred to a well-dressed friend as “all bespoke.”

But my biotech friends were not talking about clothes, and the spread of the now fashionable bespoke is far from restricted to biotech, as the headline of the 2016 New York Times article, “Bespoke This, Bespoke That. Enough Already,” makes clear. To quote the article about the power of bespoke to sell things: “The B word has become an increasingly common branding lure employed by interior design companies, publishers, surgeons and pornographers. There are bespoke wines, bespoke software, bespoke vacations, bespoke barber shops, bespoke insurance plans, bespoke yoga, bespoke tattoos, even bespoke medical implants.” My friends in biotech would add things like bespoke lists of people to contact and bespoke antibody engineering processes.

The editors at Merriam-Webster have been paying attention to the word’s semantic extension, and they published their observations in the online essay “What is the New Meaning of ‘Bespoke’?” The editors provide a nice history of the adjective bespoke and argue that it’s not the meaning “custom-made” that is new but rather the word’s extension to a wider and wider range of products far beyond clothing. It is not surprising that with the word’s semantic extension, we see a rise in frequency of use — and that increased frequency opens the door for further extensions of the word’s meaning. The Merriam-Webster essay suggests the word may be picking up connotations of “expensive.”

I am wondering if something more is afoot with bespoke, as it proliferates in advertising and professional jargon. In my informal polling, I asked my cousin who works for a major international company if she ever hears the word bespoke, and she simultaneously laughed and groaned. She reported that she was recently on a conference call during which participants used bespoke about 14 times in a matter of minutes — to the point where she felt like she had to comment on it. And here’s what really caught my attention: People in her world are talking about “bespoke answers.” As my cousin explained to me, a bespoke answer is a pat, obvious, or simple answer. The people she is talking to don’t want bespoke answers, but rather thoughtful, genuine, not prepackaged answers.

You are absolutely right if you are thinking that this understanding of a bespoke answer turns the meaning of bespoke on its head. In theory, if bespoke means “custom-made,” the bespoke answer would be the genuine answer that is tailored to the question, rather than the pat or prepackaged answer. I can imagine how the change happened though. A quick search of online advertising turns up “bespoke answers” to hair loss, packaging challenges, heating needs, etc. While these companies mean that their product or services are custom-designed, people could reinterpret bespoke in these contexts as tailored but in a mass-produced kind of way — which could lead to the idea that bespoke solutions or answers are not entirely uniquely custom-made.

Odds are that, like many fashionable items, bespoke will have its moment and then recede. What I’ll now be tracking is how many new meanings it picks up along the way.