Prêt-à-porter (French for «ready to wear») is the term for mass-produced ready-made clothing sold in standard sizes. Unlike bespoke or haute couture (high fashion) garments, prêt-à-porter is meant to be sold as-is, with no fitting required for the individual buyer. In everyday speech the terms «ready-made clothing» or «off-the-rack» are also used.
In the fashion industry, designers create prêt-à-porter collections manufactured using standard patterns, factory equipment, and faster sewing methods to cut production costs. While some fashion houses and designers put out mass-market prêt-à-porter lines, others offer limited collections that aren’t unique but are produced in small runs.
Ready-made women’s clothing only became widely available in the early twentieth century, since women’s fashion had previously required precise fitting to the figure and was complex to produce. Before that, wealthier women ordered entirely custom-made new garments, while middle- and lower-class women altered their existing clothes to keep up with shifting fashion trends.
The historic breakthrough in the spread of prêt-à-porter is tied to the name of Yves Saint Laurent, who in 1966 became the first designer to launch a ready-to-wear line and open the «Rive Gauche» boutique. Whether he actually succeeded in democratizing fashion remains an open question, since few could afford his designs, but he paved the way for ready-made clothing and the cross-pollination between haute couture and mass production.
Prêt-à-porter collections are shown twice a year during Fashion Weeks in the major fashion capitals: London, New York, Milan, and Paris. Fall/winter collections are shown in February, spring/summer in September.
In early-1990s Russia, amid economic transformation and newly opened borders, Western fashion trends and the concept of prêt-à-porter became especially attractive to entrepreneurs, who saw it as a promising line of business after decades of monotonous Soviet light industry.