Pret-a-Porter Fashion

By: Anne Robinson

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Recently, my fashion sense has changed. I am more aware of eco-friendly fashion options and am definitely never buying anything from a street vendor ever again (or even looking at their selection for that matter).

With all of this, is a new found interest in really understanding how and where my clothes and accessories were made.

Incase you had to ask yourself, when you read this post title, what is pret-a-porter fashion, I'll translate for you. Pret-a-porter means ready-to-wear fashion.

Basically, reread my haute couture post ( http://designerlanddetector.blogspot.com/2009/06/truth-behind-haute-couture.html ) and then think opposites. Ready-to-wear fashion is, in a sense, the opposite of haute couture fashion.

These designs are manufactured, by a machine, in bulk and are sized according to standard sizing charts. Then, they go on the shelves. You may have also heard this fashion style referred to as "off the rack". These designs are much cheaper than couture and much more accessible to consumers.

I feel a little history coming on.
The clothing industry first began to flourish in the 1700s, mostly in the U.S., China, and Europe.

Surprisingly, it was the need for military uniforms that started the production of different styles of clothing.

In 1790, the first sewing machine was invented by Thomas Saint. In the following decades, many other inventors tried to improve the machine. In 1830, Frenchman Barthelemy Thimmonier invented the first fully-functional sewing machine.

Just to throw in an interesting fact, Thimmonier's shop was burnt down after his invention went public by tailors who worried the invention would cause them to lose their jobs.

A few years later, Elias Howe and Walter Hunt improved the invention and patented it. In the 1850's sewing machines became mass produced.

Ready-to-wear clothing is produced based on the U.S. standard clothing sizes chart, developed in the 1940s. However, over the years sizes have become bigger and now do not closely resemble the original chart. These sizes are referred to as 'catalogue sizes'.

As people (women mostly) began to get bigger, so did sizes. A woman is more likely to buy something if it's a smaller size than she usually wears. What used to be considered a size 12 is now a size 6.

So, to sum up, the two big distinctions in fashion are haute couture and ready-to-wear or pret-a-porter. Haute couture is hand-made to fit a specific person's measurements and is extremely expensive. Ready-to-wear clothes are manufactured by machines, based on the standardized clothing sizes and goes right to store shelves, making the clothes more available to the average consumer.