Some stylish baby names in Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel’s Nameberry 9.

When I heard that Lily Allen was expecting a second child, my heart skipped a beat.

I don’t know Lily Allen.  When her first baby arrived, I had to Google search to find out that she was a singer, and I’d never heard her sing until I headed to YouTube.

The British pop starlet turned television presenter made waves with her first daughter’s name, Ethel Mary, and I’ve followed her ever since.  She didn’t disappoint with her second daughter’s name, Marnie Rose.

What would you call Allen’s style?

I’m thinking “So Retro it Hurts.”  She chooses great names that few of us have the guts to use – yet.

We classify names as traditional or modern, classic or trendy.  But the truth is that everything goes when it comes names, and there are all sorts of styles and strategies to describe our approaches to naming children.

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The strongest baby name influences right now: Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, and ancient Rome.  Many of the hot names relate to nature and to worlds beyond our own.  And most share a transcendence of traditional gender identity, containing elements of names for the opposite gender if not crossing over to unisex territory.

Nameberry’s hottest names of the year, which we predict you’ll be hearing lots more of in the future, are:

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Nameberry guest blogger and star intern Hannah Tenison uncovers a catalogue of intriguingly stylish baby names.

Savvy shoppers know that the best deals and sales are to be found after the holidays, when retailers who need to make room for new spring inventory drastically slash prices. This year, with my gift cards in hand, I have been browsing clothing websites in search of the best deals and steals.

What I found, however, in addition to the array of beautifully discounted clothing I had anticipated, was a plethora of stylish baby names. Retailers, perhaps in an effort to imbue their clothing with a certain personality or style, are frequently naming their garments, and some clothing manufacturers are surprisingly (and delightfully) very skilled at the name game.

One of my favorite websites to troll, Rugby Ralph Lauren, offered up such a dazzling bevy of holiday delicacies that I felt compelled to share them with all the other berries out there! The choices range from the lusciously feminissima (Calixta and Forsythia) to crusty surname (Talcott and Ackley) to epic medieval (Baldric and Rowena), and all of them were so appealing that it was hard to whittle down the complete list of stylish baby names I’d found. The ones I’ve compiled for the sake of this blog are my favorites; unusual, fresh, and imminently “wearable.” In any case, Rugby is brilliant for putting so much effort into these names; I can’t be the only one who, given the choice between a blouse called “Araminte” and one called “Maddysin,” would take the former!

Girls

Aberdare

Althea

Araminte

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One of our most popular blogs of the year was the one in which Elisabeth Wilborn of You Can’t Call It It transformed the Top 100 girls’ names — and the following week, the most popular boys’ names – into choices with the same feel but more distinction and style.

This is the kind of exercise that Linda and I have long offered in our books, with our If You Like X, You’ll Love…. feature, in which we substitute fresh ideas for overused favorites.  You can see dozens of such lists here.

But what if the name you want to move beyond isn’t popular, really; isn’t exactly overused but just, to your thinking, too trendy?  What if you want to take an already-stylish and distinctive name and just scooch it toward being….more distinctive?

That’s what we tried to do here.  We bet you clever berries will have lots more ideas of trendy names and possible substitutes: We’d love to hear them!  Here are some of ours:

girls

Instead of Ariana….Aurora

Instead of Delilah….Salome

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Some stylish names share a first initial: Vowel names are particularly popular right now, for instance. Other times, it’s a rhythm or ending sound: Boys’ names with two syllables that end in N or R are big these days.

Still other fashionable names share an ethnic origin such as Irish or a gender identity like unisex or girly-girl.

But the names here, among the most popular AND the most stylish names of our day, have something much more illusive in common. You might even find yourself adding many of them to your shortlist without putting your finger on their mutual appeal.

The secret: An L in the middle.

That might seem like a little thing, but we posit that the L sound, particularly fashionable now too as a first initial, rings all kinds of positive bells in our subconscious, relating to such uplifting qualities as lovely and lilting and, well, even uplifting.

It’s no accident that the following L-in-the-middle names are stylish these days, particularly for girls. Some examples:

Alexa
Alice (plus Alyssa and sisters)
Amelia
Brooklyn (plus most names that end in lyn)
Camilla
Celia (and Cecilia, Cecily etc)

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