Haute couture literally translates to high sewing in French and it refers to luxury, custom-made dresses and garments but it’s also a copyrighted term given to a select few brands such as Chanel and Schiaparelli (the namesake designers being rivals in their lifetimes). Nonetheless, there are small dressmaking shops where people make custom made outfits and they’re not considered to be haute couture if because they’re not called as such even though what they do’s pretty close. Perhaps haute couture really is a title reserved for a select few brands that deserve it in their eyes.
When it comes to haute couture, the sewing techniques are probably more elaborate than the ones used for ready to wear clothing. It’s not standard size, it’s custom fit. It also takes a long time to make, longer than it does to make ready to wear clothing which allows for mechanised sewing to get the job done quicker. Much of haute couture is handmade so a lot of work’s being put into it, hence why it can get luxurious as it’s time-consuming and labourious. (If garments were handmade before in the past, despite not being custom fit it would’ve taken the sewers a long time to finish and longer than they would with sewing machines.)
Not all dressmaking shops necessarily become haute couture ones, even if what they do sometimes overlaps with the real haute couture brands and some of them are even high-end dressmaking shops at that. Haute couture garments are also made for display, they may not always have a price tag but they’re sometimes done for show and not for profit (this is mostly reserved for ready to wear garments, which bring in more money for fashion houses). But when they do get bought and sold, they’re sometimes sold at high prices that it’s easier to sell the cheaper perfumes, shoes and ready to wear garments instead.
(The latter three also bring in more money and profit for fashion houses.)
Custom made clothing can be more expensive than ready to wear, the latter uses standard sizing and arguably a one-size-fits-all approach the other is tailor made to fit the wearer’s proportions and if given a little leeway, the wearer’s tastes so it’s more expensive this way and if a lot of haute couture is custom-made it ought to be more expensive as well even if some of them are made without being sold. (These outfits are for show as I said before.) So logically, the ready to wear line is where the cheaper clothes are at and they make more money for fashion houses than they would with haute couture garments.
If haute couture relies a lot on custom made or bespoke dressmaking and sewing, ready to wear’s the opposite as it relies a lot on standard sizes and tends to be mass manufactured. This helps when it came to the advent of sewing machines, which made it easier to manufacture a lot more garments in a shorter span of time than one would with hand sewn garments. Most fashion brands are ready to wear and haute couture brands allow a ready to wear line. This makes more money, especially since they’re cheaper and quicker to make.
Ready to wear brands range from those selling at mid prices such as Guess to those selling at low prices such as H&M, well at least in the West since these are expensive here in the Philippines. (Bear in mind that H&M and Zara are considered to be fast fashion brands or where clothing’s made at low prices and the dressmaking process’s hastened to keep up with the latest clothing fads.) But they tend to make a lot more money for the fashion houses and companies than one would with luxury haute couture, being cheaper and quicker to make does help with appealing to more customers this way.
Ready to wear brands can be handmade to some extent, especially with the slow-fashion brands and for some sewers who prefer to sew the curved parts by hand but they’re primarily made by machines which gets the job done quicker and sooner. It would take 10 to 16 hours to get a dress done by hand but less than that by machine, which helps in mass producing clothes in order to be up to date with the latest clothing fads and trends. (Not that haute couture is any less trendy, if anything it does help start the trend but since it’s not machine-made it can take a long time to make.)
Dressmaking has benefited from technology, especially when it comes to getting garments done faster and more efficiently. It also helps with standard sizes since they don’t take much time the same way doing bespoke sewing does, which involves taking the time to measure a person’s proportions and that gets real tricky to do. But there are those who prefer to sew things by hand, it may be the busier and slower of the two but some people like it this way and there are those who do both machine and hand sewing. It goes both ways when it comes to selling garments, depending on one’s preferences of course.