Ready-to-Wear: Where Convenience Meets Couture!

Juliana Barreto Pinto
5 feb 2024
3 Min. de lectura

Actualizado: 31 ene

By Juliana Barreto Pinto

Perhaps throughout your life, you have heard the term Ready-to-wear on television or in your social networks. Surely if you've read magazines like VOGUE, ELLE, Vanity Fair, among others, you've come across the term, or its analog in French Prêt-à-porter.

Maybe you know something about it, or you have no idea what it means. Whatever your case is, in this article you can find what you need to know to be clearer about what Ready-to-wear means in the fashion world.

Dior Spring-Summer 2023 RTW

What is Ready-to-wear?

To begin with, ready-to-wear is very common in the fashion industry, but it is not as accessible as, for example, fast fashion. Ready-to-wear, also called ready-to-wear, off-the-rack, and off-the-peg, is basically, an article of clothing or product that we can buy and wear immediately.

The collections that are considered ready-to-wear, have as their main characteristics, to have standardized sizes, for instance, from size XS-XXXL. They are mass-produced in factories, and most importantly, when they are sold, they are sold in a finished and ready state.

This also means an evolution in fashion, because consumers went from buying something made-to-measure, from buying their clothes directly from the designer to choosing them in a store, finding a variety of garments (still selected ones) and sizes.

When did it become popular?

Something that several designers like Pierre Cardin for instance, wanted to achieve with prêt-à-porter was to have a great reach with the crowds through garments that could be seen as casual in style, but still luxurious to a certain extent.

Pierre Cardin, 1966

Nonetheless, the designer that ended up popularizing the term, is none other than the designer Yves Saint Laurent in 1966 with his launch of Rive Gauche.

From that moment on, other high-end designers such as Dior or Chanel (among others) followed him on the ready-to-wear path.

It is important to clarify that there are runways and fashion shows focused solely on ready-to-wear collections. These are presented at fashion weeks in Paris, London, Milan, and New York to name a few.

Here you can check some of the Prêt-à-porter Spring collections (celebrating that spring is here... finally) of the most famous designers nowadays, in the last 3 years.