couturière

plural couturières · alternative couturiere

1. A woman who runs a business in custom-made fashion.

   In her early years she [Coco Chanel] wanted to sing on stage, rather than to become a couturière.

   2021, Michelle Brandstrup, “Entrepreneurs in the fashion industry”, in Léo-Paul Dana, editor, World Encyclopedia of Entrepreneurship, 2nd edition, Edward Elgar Publishing, →ISBN, page 167

   4 more examples

   Considering the enormous cost of the gowns, which the countess had insisted Leah needed, she imagined the couturière’s fees for such work would be equally as hefty.

   1994, Charlene Cross, Almost a Whisper, Pocket Books, →ISBN, page 47

   Many of Chanel’s biographers give the impression that she became a couturière by chance or whim, whereas in fact she had strong business sense and the backing of an intelligent, influential partner in Boy Capel.

   1994, Amy De la Haye, Shelley Tobin, Chanel: The Couturiere at Work, →ISBN, page 26

   A positive note today was a visit by Aunt Emily’s couturière to measure me for some ‘appropriately fashionable gowns’ as if we Americans have no idea of fashion or style.

   2012, Robert Warr, The Barker’s Dozen, Bellorum, →ISBN, page 56

   In just moments a skirt is conceived, designed and crafted as the couturière constructs the garment “in any way that might strike her fancy.”

   2020, Patricia Zakreski, “The Writer and the Couturière: Authorship and Creative Industry in the 1870s”, in Gerald Egan, editor, Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, page 213