Ready-to-wear (RTW) – also called prêt-à-porter, or off-the-rack or off-the-peg in casual use – is the term for garments sold in finished condition in standardized sizes, as distinct from made-to-measure or bespoke clothing tailored to a particular person's frame. In other words, it is a piece of clothing that was mass produced in different sizes and sold that way instead of it being designed and sewn for one person. The term off-the-peg is sometimes used for items other than clothing, such as handbags. It is the opposite of haute couture.
Chanel is a French luxury fashion house founded in 1910 by Coco Chanel in Paris. It is privately owned by the Wertheimer family and has been headquartered in London since 2018.
Givenchy is a French luxury fashion and perfume house. It hosts the brand of haute couture and ready-to-wear clothing, accessories, perfumes and cosmetics of Parfums Givenchy. The house of Givenchy was founded in 1952 by designer Hubert de Givenchy and is a member of Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture et du Prêt-à-Porter. It is currently owned by luxury conglomerate LVMH.
Brioni is an Italian menswear luxury fashion house based in Rome and specialised in sartorial ready-to-wear, leather goods, shoes, eyewear and fragrance, and provides a tailor-made service (Bespoke).
Cerruti 1881, also known as Cerruti, is an Italian luxury fashion house founded in 1967 and headquartered in Paris. It was founded by the Italian stylist and fashion producer Nino Cerruti. It was named "1881" because Nino's grandfather established the family woolen mill, Fratelli Cerruti Wool Mill, in Italy in 1881.
Chloé is a French luxury fashion house founded in 1952 by Gaby Aghion. During the next year of 1953 Aghion joined forces with Jacques Lenoir, formally managing the business side of the brand, allowing Aghion to purely pursue the creative growth of Chloé. Its headquarters are located in Paris. The house is owned by luxury brands holding company Richemont Group. Chloé has been worn by many celebrities, including Marion Cotillard, Sienna Miller, Madonna, January Jones, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Kirsten Dunst, Cameron Diaz, Emma Stone, Clémence Poésy and Katie Holmes. The brand is characterized by a youthful and bohemian aesthetic, and has produced several successful fragrances. As of October 2023, Chemena Kamali is its creative director.
Moschino is an Italian luxury fashion house founded in 1983 by Franco Moschino in Milan known for over-the-top, campy designs. The company specializes in ready-to-wear, handbags, and fashion accessories. Moschino's creative director is Adrian Appiolaza.
Jacques Fath was a French fashion designer who was considered one of the three dominant influences on postwar haute couture, the others being Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain. The playwright Georges Fath was his great-grandfather.
Fashion design is the art of applying design, aesthetics, clothing construction and natural beauty to clothing and its accessories. It is influenced by culture and different trends, and has varied over time and place. "A fashion designer creates clothing, including dresses, suits, pants, and skirts, and accessories like shoes and handbags, for consumers. He or she can specialize in clothing, accessory, or jewelry design, or may work in more than one of these areas."
Giambattista Valli is an Italian fashion designer. He is from Rome, Italy. His collections, both ready to wear and Haute couture, are presented semi-annually during Paris Fashion Week.
Lanvin is a French luxury fashion house based in Paris. Founded in 1889 by Jeanne Lanvin, it is the oldest French fashion house still in operation. Since 2018, it has been a subsidiary of Shanghai-based Lanvin Group. Bruno Sialelli, a 31-year-old French designer, was named Creative Director of Lanvin in January 2019.
Italy is one of the leading countries in fashion design, alongside France and the United Kingdom. Fashion has always been an important part of the country's cultural life and society, and Italians are well known for their attention to dress; la bella figura, or good appearance, retains its traditional importance.
Josephus Melchior Thimister was a Dutch interior decorator and noted fashion designer who launched his eponymous fashion label, THIMISTER in 1997. In 2001, the editor-in-chief of Vogue USA Anna Wintour named Josephus Thimister as one of the Twenty-First Century's best fashion designers. In 2010, Cathy Horyn writing for The New York Times described his couture show and its pieces as, "fascinating (…) quite clear in military shapes and broken elegance. Dresses like melted down family silver". After a brief period with Karl Lagerfeld as an assistant, he worked as a designer at Jean Patou before being appointed director of luxury prêt-à-porter at the house of Balenciaga. It was for the next five and a half years that Thimister would spend reviving the brand with his pure, succinctly modernist vision. He then set up his own Paris-based house in 1997, and thereafter presented both haute couture and prêt-à-porter collections under his name.
Stéphane Rolland is a French fashion designer and an haute couture fashion brand. His mother worked at Pictorial Service, one of the most famous Parisian photographic studios, and he grew up surrounded by black-and-white photographs. "Everything was black-and-white; everything was about volume and contrast. My eyes were trained early on with these concepts and everything I do is about contrast, volume and movement. It’s in my DNA".
Vionnet is an haute couture label founded by the French couturier Madeleine Vionnet. Established in 1912, the house of Vionnet closed doors in 1939. Vionnet was relaunched by Guy and Arnaud de Lummen in the mid-1990s with perfumes and accessories, and then in 2006 with ready-to-wear collections. In 2012, Vionnet was purchased by the Kazakh businesswoman Goga Ashkenazi. In 2023, Chimhaeres Investments purchased the brand.
Jesús Guillermo Mariotto is a Venezuelan-Italian fashion designer and TV personality.
JJ Valaya is an Indian fashion designer and couturier from New Delhi, India. He founded the House of Valaya, a luxury fashion and lifestyle house in 1992, along with his brother TJ Singh. A founding member of Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) and the first global brand ambassador of Crystal giant Swarovski. He has been designing for over 20 years. As a fine art photographer, he released his first book, Decoded Paradox in 2011. In the same year, he also closed the day one of the Lakme Fashion Week (LFW) winter/festive 2011 where he debuted a fashion collection inspired by photography.
Maison Margiela, formerly Maison Martin Margiela, is a French luxury fashion house founded by Belgian designer Martin Margiela and Jenny Meirens in 1988 and headquartered in Paris. The house produces both haute couture-inspired artisanal collections and ready-to-wear collections, with the former influencing the designs of the latter. Product lines include womenswear, menswear, jewellery, footwear, accessories, leather goods, perfumes and household goods. Known for deconstructive and avant-garde designs with unconventional materials, Maison Margiela has traditionally held live shows in unusual settings, for example empty metro stations and street corners. Models' faces are often obscured by fabric or long hair to direct attention to the clothes and design. Margiela resigned as creative designer in 2009 and John Galliano was appointed to the role in 2014.
Fernanda Gattinoni was an Italian fashion designer who was the founder of the Gattinoni atelier. She left Italy at age 17 and worked as an apprentice for the London-based Molineaux fashion house. Gattinoni returned to Italy in 1930 to become head of the creative department for the Ventura atelier after declining an offer to work for Chanel in Paris. In 1946, she established the Gattinoni atelier and designed costumes for Italian notability and notable foreign figures. Gattinoni earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Costume Design with her design of Audrey Hepburn's attire in the 1956 film War and Peace. She was appointed Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in July 1998. A biography on Gattinoni was published in 2010 and a garden in Rome was named after the fashion designer four years later.
Maison Schiaparelli is a haute couture house created by avant-garde Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli in 1927, and moving towards luxury ready-to-wear after being bought in 2007 by Diego Della Valle. The house is famous for its eccentric fashions, the use of Surrealism in its collections, its sense of humour, the "shocking Pink" color, gender crossing, and its use of human anatomy depictions, among other unconventional themes.
