The inventor of the word fashionista apologizes

Fashionista is a word that we can hear everywhere in the fashion world. We correlate it with a designer of haute couture or a devoted follower of fashion as the Oxford Dictionary states.

Yes, it is a word that is in the dictionary and very much used nowadays. And for that, its author Stephen Fried apologizes. His intention was not to create such a big proportion madness around a word.

He invented it searching for the right description for the people in the fashion business (models, designers, journalists etc) when writing the book Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia published in 1993.

Stephen Fried declared in an interview for the American magazine The Atlantic:"I should excuse to all the language users for my crime in terminology...About 20 years ago, I apparently changed the language for ever... I have published a book that talked about persons who doubted anything and a powerful and polemical word came out. This word was fashionista."

Sometimes, dictionaries have not enough words to express a certain state or fact. What Stephen Fried did was pointing out the essence of a state of mind everywhere in the fashion industry.