The Etymology of Blouse
Blouse arrived in English in 1828 as an exotic French import — a loose, blue-dyed smock worn by French peasants and railway workers, popularised by Romantic painters in Bohemian Paris. The deeper etymology is genuinely uncertain. Three competing theories survive: that blouse is from Provençal blouso (short, dialectal for a kind of woollen tunic); that it descends from a Late Latin (camisa) pelusia, a tunic from the Egyptian port of Pelusium where a particular linen weave was made; or that it is simply an onomatopoeic word for puffed-out cloth. None of the explanations is fully satisfactory. What is clear is the journey from working-class French smock to fashionable feminine garment, which took about fifty years: by the 1870s a blouse was a soft, full-cut shirt worn by women with a tailored skirt, and the word completed its journey from French peasantry to bourgeois Parisian wardrobe.