vogue [L16th] Fashion and rowing may not appear to have much in common, but Italian voga, ‘rowing, fashion’, from which vogue came derives from vogare ‘to row, go well’. During the 17th century vogue was definitely in vogue, developing most of its current meanings. In the 1980s dancers in clubs began to vogue, imitating the characteristic poses struck by a model on a catwalk—the word here refers to the glossy fashion magazine Vogue, which started life in 1892 as a weekly New York society paper before the US publisher Condé Nast bought it and transformed it from 1909.