Creative Baby Naming :: Tilly & the Buttons

Inspiration :: Françoise (painting by François Krige)

Being a name nerd, the first thing that I look for when browsing sewing patterns are their names. The names of the patterns are important in attracting the right customer and they add to your business style. My next part of my creative baby naming venture will look at designers’ pattern name choices – to analyse, praise or criticise.

Tilly and the Buttons

Martha
Marigold
Dominique
Fifi
Coco
Bettine
Orla
Françoise
Arielle
Agnes
Miette
Mathilde

Tilly and the Buttons’ bright, classic sewing patterns have names in a distinctly French style. She uses tailored names like Arielle, Miette and Mathilde to reflect the nature of her fitted garments alongside familiar vintage choices like Agnes and Martha and the lighter style of Fifi, Coco and Orla.

The highest placed name in the UK top 1000 is Mathilde (at number 30) and then Martha (at number 69). Coco, Orla and Agnes are ranked further down the list. Coco and Orla are very pertinent to the fashion world with links to Coco Chanel and Orla Kiely. This adds a touch of glamour to the list which balances out some of the datedness of names like Dominique.

As a sort of sibset, the names work very well together. She has a specific naming style but with a lot of variety. From unusual to familiar, from shorter to longer names.

Sewing pattern name ranking :: 4/5

Creative Baby Naming

Inspiration :: Skye (painting of the Isle of Skye)

People often make lists of names titled '10 Great Artist Names' or 'The Most Creative Musician Names'. These lists are great for honouring your favourite creative souls but what I find is that their names are often not all that creative. This is because they had no say in the name they were given, it was their parents' choice - which is why you get painters named Brian and fabric designers named Linda. So today I am showing you the names that creative people give their children - the names that the creative people themselves have chosen. 

I looked through issues of 'Mollie Makes' - a sewing and craft magazine that I read. The names were mostly short and sweet. They were a mix of vintage nicknames, Scandi minimalism, word names and English elegance.Here are some of the sibsets I found. 

Finn & Ruby
Daisy, Alfie, Frankie & Betty
Bor & Rover
Bay, Oscar, Hal & Orion
Wolf & Mus
Tallulah, Woody, Jesse & Mathilda
Bonnie & Betsy
Boudica Venus May
Jack & Otto
Ted
Max & Selma
Skye
Charlie, Nomi, Liv & Viggo
Violet
Rafferty
Ruby & George
Solie, Rosa & Pearl
Uma
Satine
Lois & Ellie
Skip
Babette, Rosemarijn, Anne-Floor & Friso
Cooper & Campell
Bert & Gus
Elfie
Edith
Sonny & Huck
Lina
Alfred & Flossie
Arthur & Kit
Ellerie
Atlee
Ruby
Anton & Hope
Emily
Moos

The Classic Name Formula

Inspiration :: Bernard (painting by Mike Bernard)

It is a question that plagues name nerds- what consists of a classic name? As this brilliant article says, classic is often associated with good especially at this time in fashion history where people are favouring styles that were fashionable decades ago. When this is combined with the minimalist buy-only-a-few-items philosophy, 'classic' is the new modern. But classic is hard to pin down.

I feel that there should be a formula or a system to find classic names but this is hard when classic is so undefinable. Upswing Baby Names (in the post I linked above) did such a great job at this and I would like to have a go myself.

My first though was to find names that were popular in the late 19th century and early 20^th century that are still popular now. Below is a chart of my findings:

The problem with this method is that, because names from the 19th century are popular again now, we see the revival names rather than the classics. Their graphs look like a U shape rather than the level graph you would expect with a classic name.

It also leaves out the names we consider classic (Mary etc.) that are in decline at the moment.

And where do we stop? There are so many names that peaked in the 80s that are still popular today – we can hardly class all of them as popular. In my chart, I used all the names from 1940 and before that are still popular today.  So maybe classic isn’t a fixed state. Maybe it is more fluid. We can’t say that Isla is a classic name at the moment but it may well be in the future.

For my next try, I used the number of times a name had been in the top 100 as a marker. These names have all appeared in the top 100 ten or more times:

But this doesn’t take into account that some of these names just don’t ‘sound’ classic. Mohammed still sounds exotic – even though it has been in the top 100 since the 1920s. Bernard and Janet sound incredibly dated. However, these names appear further down the 'classic' list. We could just use the top few as they seem like the most classic names but that doesn't give parents much of a choice when trying to find the stylish classics they crave.

Sadly, it is obvious that I still haven’t found a foolproof system yet. But I am beginning to understand that when many parents say 'classic', they are actually looking for revival names. 

Name Style

Inspiration :: Caroline (painting by Caroline Ashwood)

We often discuss names using words such as ‘vintage’, ‘modern’ or ‘frilly’ when discussing names. People often describe their style as ‘old fashioned’, ‘arty’ or ‘unusual’. But most of these terms are highly subjective. When researching ‘classic’ names I found everything from Waldo and Wolfgang to Mary and Caroline and even greater number of variations on how people defined a ‘classic’ name. Some thought that all ‘old-fashioned’ names were classics and some ‘classics’ mentioned hadn’t ever entered the top 100.

This lead me to want to devise a system of categorising naming style. There are many quizzes you can do but they are often based on non-naming questions, have confusing categories and have highly subjective lists of names that ‘fit’ each category. I thought about the elements of a name that I could measure – a similar idea to shape, colour, texture etc. - the elements of art.

Names may first seem like a bundle of letters with the elements of phonology (sound) and length. Then you can research the meaning, the etymology (where the name came from and the components that make it up) and celebrity usage or cultural connotations. The third group of elements would look at its birth (when the name was first used), past popularity and current popularity.

My system takes the sound and length of the name and the past popularity of the name to create 16 main categories and 4 side categories (which I haven’t published on the page yet) of name style. I tried to pick elements that were easily quantifiable and that seem the main components of peoples’ favourite names lists. I classified the names according to sound and length and then looked at the point in which they peaked from the 1880s to the 2010s (using NameVoyager as it is the only tool to do this – even though it is based on the American charts). The downside of it is that, in a decade, the system will seem out of date but I am working on updating the system so that this will not matter.

Another problem I had was naming the categories. I had made sure that it was the same system for male and female names (unlike my first attempts) as we continue to see gender-bending and gender-equality as themes in today’s naming culture. I also did not want to make any category sound more positive or negative than any other (eg. if I had used the word ‘dated’ which has a negative connotation). The popularity labels were harder. I worked on the rule that an antique was something older than 100 years and vintage meant that something was older than 50 years. Retro has many meanings but it sounded much better than the ‘early modern’ label that was originally for the ‘retro’ category. The current popularity labels are not really part of the system but I thought it would be useful for those who would prefer a more popular or less popular name.

So if you would like to look for names that are similar in style, visit the ‘Name Style’ page. I have sorted all of the names from the UK top 1000 2014 and am now sorting names not in the top 1000. You should find an explanation of the category names also.