Fashion Ready to Wear Surprisingly,

Fashion Ready to Wear

Surprisingly, ready-made or ready-to-wear clothing stems back to the Civil War, although such designs were in short supply at that time. The growth of manufacturing production, the advertising industry, urban professionals, and chain stores and mail order catalogs that allowed countrywide availability enhanced the development of ready-made apparel. Throughout the 20th century, many international haute couture designers, such as Elsa Schiaparelli, Pierre Balmain, Geoffrey Beene and Kishore Biyani began transposing their fashions for the ready-to-wear market and created an industry of mass merchandising.

Ready-to-wear collections are not custom made and are standard sized, which makes them more suitable for larger productions. Ready-to- wear collections consist of a normally represent a certain theme or perspective and to make a fashion statement. They are branded and sold in stores for the mass public marketplace. One of the first designers following this mode was Elsa Schiaparelli. Born in Rome Italy in 1890, she studied philosophy and then moved to the United States and worked as a film scriptwriter.

In 1920, Schiaparelli went to Paris and designed and wore a black sweater knitted with a white bow. An American store saw this design and asked for an order, and her ready-to-wear business took off with hundreds of knitters producing the fashions. Schiaparelli's designs were innovative and very popular with their use of bright colors, often pink, and her imaginative use of conventional fabrics, zippers and very unusual hats and shoes. Many of her notable designs were based on the inspirations of her friends, who included Christian Berard, Jean Cocteau, and Salvador Dal', such as a summer dress with lobsters. She brought attention to detail in all her ready-to-wear collections and comical additions, such as embroidered add-ons, odd buttons and complex zipper patterns. She was one of the first women designers to license out her name, so it could be associated with mass produced clothing, such as hats, nylons, perfumes and tartans (Who's Who in the Twentieth Century 1999).

Fashion designer Pierre Balmain, was born in St. Jean de Maurienne, Savoie, France, in 1914. After receiving his degree in architecture, he freelanced as an illustrator and assistant designer and was trained, as was Christian Dior, by two of the most well-known designers of the time, Molyneux and Lucien Lelong. He opened his own haute couture house right after the end of World War II in Paris and remained its director until 1982 when he died. It did not take long for Balmain's popularity to spread because of his new created image for women, who wanted to forget the vestiges of war hardships and once again look elegant and opulent in richly embroidered gowns. Over the years, he became famous for his elegant simplicity for evening dresses, tailored suits, sportswear, and stoles. He designed regularly for the theatre and cinema (Encyclopedia Britannica).

In the 1960s, Balmain's business expanded with his sculptured designs of fabric with structural contrasts of cut and style. Balmain's foundation in architecture greatly influenced his designs. He saw clothes as architectural elements coming alive in human form. He was able to translate French fashion into clothes for the larger-framed American woman without compromising his elegant simplicity style. His ready-to-wear division, for which Balmain designed many sportswear collections, was founded in the 1970s, gradually made an impact on the market and presently has 220 licenses worldwide (Encyclopedia Britannica).

It was not only in Europe where ready-to-wear fashions were created. Geoffrey Beene, another well-known ready-to-wear designer, was born in Haynesville, Louisiana, in 1927. After deciding not to go into medicine, Beene felt his best personal expression could be made through fashion design. He graduated from the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York and L'Academie Julian in Paris and started his design career in 1949. His unusual designs quickly became popular (Schiro 1994).

In 1962, Beene formed his own company and sold his first collection of women's designs. He began branding his own label within a year, which was extended to menswear in 1969. He received the Neiman Marcus Award for fashion twice, as well as eight Coty Awards for his high-quality ready-to-wear designs. His clothing is a mixture of imaginative design with a technical skill that separated him from many other labels. In many regards, it was Beene who truly became America's first major contributor to a mass production of ready-made fashions. At the time in Europe, mass-produced clothing was poor in quality and purchased only by those who could not afford designer clothing. Beene changed this by helping to make ready-to-wear chic. "Although he became known for such shapes as the bolero and the streamlining jumpsuit, and for proposing seemingly illogical combinations of fabric - the fancy with the naive - his real achievement was to address the three-dimensional quality of the body" (Schiro 1994).

In India, as little as two decades ago, the thought of buying ready-to-wear clothing at a major department store would have been totally alien to almost everyone in the country. Even in the 1980s, middle-class Indian housewives usually bought their fabric from a small neighborhood shop and brought it to local tailor, who hand fashioned it into a custom-made garment. However, in the late 1990s, India's significant economic expansion welcomed a retail revolution. A growing affluent middle class became a prime market for well-made and reasonably priced ready-to-wear clothing, and shopping in malls in cities, suburbs and small towns throughout the country turned into one of the most popular pastime (Reich 2006).

Kishore Biyani, CEO of Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd. (Pantaloon), India's largest clothing retail chain, is one of the leading figures who ushered in India's retail transformation. He helped grow India's brand new ready-to-wear retail clothing institution from just a very small number of clothing manufacturers to today's massive industry. From his business launch in 1967, with a pair of ready-to-wear trousers, he has grown a retail empire of over 2.4 million square feet with sales of approximately $266 million in 2004 (Reich 2006).