Other forms: fashioned, fashions, fashioning
Fashion is the style of clothes that is popular right now. Follow fashion, out of fashion, the fashion industry.
It changes by design: the industry depends on this year's clothes looking wrong next year, which is the whole economic engine. In fashion and out of fashion apply to ideas and words as much as clothes. As a verb, to fashion is to shape something by hand. Note after a fashion, meaning barely adequately; and that fashion and faction are the same Latin word.
1nounfashionThe style of clothes that is popular now.
“Short skirts were the height of fashion in the 1960s.”
2verbshapeTo shape something by hand.
“He fashioned a little boat out of an old piece of wood.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
fashion is a prevailing style.
Old French façon comes from Latin factio, a making, from facere, to do. Faction is the same word by another route, and the verb sense of shaping is the older one.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁-
Latin
factiō — a making
Anglo-Norman
fechoun
Middle English
facioun
English, today
fashion
Built from
Middle English facioun, from Anglo-Norman fechoun (compare Jersey Norman faichon), variant of Old French faceon, fazon, façon (“fashion, form, make, outward appearance”), from Latin factiō (“a making”), from faciō (“do, make”); see fact. a doublet of faction.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA