frippery

Definition

Ostentation, as in fancy clothing.

Etymology

From French friperie, from Old French fripier (“to rub up and down, to wear into rags”). Compare fripper.

Example Sentences

• "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."