Couture
Couture is the creation of custom-made garments for individual clients, often involving intensive handwork, precise tailoring, and repeated fittings.
Made-to-measure: Clothing produced to a customer's measurements, usually by adapting an existing pattern. It customizes fit but typically offers less design freedom and handwork than couture.
Haute couture: A legally defined French fashion designation for houses meeting specific standards of custom work and presentation. It is a regulated, high-profile form of couture with formal requirements.
Rose Bertin: A French dressmaker and fashion merchant who served Marie Antoinette in the late eighteenth century. Her court commissions illustrate the prominence of custom dressmaking before modern couture houses.
Ready-to-wear: Clothing manufactured in standard sizes and sold as finished garments. Unlike couture, it is produced for sale before an individual customer is fitted.
Fashion show: A staged presentation of garments, often worn by models before an audience. Couture collections are presented in shows that display designs and house craftsmanship.
Patternmaking: The drafting and manipulation of templates used to cut and assemble garments. Patterns translate a couture design into pieces shaped for one client's body.
Tailoring: The craft of cutting, fitting, and constructing garments, especially shaped jackets and suits. Couture draws on tailoring to create precise structure around an individual body.
Charles Frederick Worth: An English-born designer who established a Paris fashion house in the nineteenth century. Worth helped establish the designer-led fashion house model associated with couture.
Bespoke tailoring: Custom garment-making in which a pattern is created for one client, traditionally for suits. It shares individual fitting with couture but is especially associated with tailored menswear.
Fashion house: A company or atelier that creates and sells clothing under a designer or brand name. A couture house coordinates designers, skilled makers, fittings, and client commissions.