frippery

noun

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

1. Ostentation, as in fancy clothing.

   “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.”

2. Useless things; trifles.

   “[Olmsted reiterated his insistence that in Chicago] simplicity and reserve will be practiced and petty effects and frippery avoided.”

   ““At any rate you see me still unmarried. I have found no time to palter with the fripperies of women.””

3. Cast-off clothes.

   “If thou doſt, come ouer, and but ſee our fripperie: change an olde ſhirt, for a whole ſmocke, with vs.”

4. The trade or traffic in old clothes.
5. The place where old clothes are sold.

   “Oh, ho, Monſter: wee know what belongs to a frippery, O King Stephano.”

6. Hence: secondhand finery; cheap and tawdry decoration; affected elegance.

   “There's my pretty darling Kate; the faſhions of the times have almoſt infected her too. By living a year or two in town, ſhe is as fond of gauze, and French frippery, as the beſt of them.”

   “[…] but consider I was born in the land of talisman and spell, and my childhood lulled by tales which you can only enjoy through the gauzy frippery of a French translation.”