prêt-à-porter

adjective

Ready-to-wear.

OriginFrench prêt-à-porter ← English ready-to-wear →
Ask AI about this wordChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

Meanings

adjectiveprêt-à-porter (not comparable)
  1. not comparableReady-to-wear.

    gloves, scarves, jewellery, and prêt-à-porter clothes; belts, beads, flowers, scent ... all the fleeting frivolities and lovely ephemera of the passing mode are strewn about as though by some demented diseuse gone berserk with her travelling trunk of properties.

    1957, Francis Cowley Burnand, Henry Mayhew, Mark Lemon, Owen Seaman, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor (editors), Punch, volume 232, page 136

Synonyms & antonyms

Also see
off-the-pegready-to-wear

Origin

  1. Englishready-to-wear
  2. Frenchprêt-à-porter
  3. Englishprêt-à-porter

First use appears c. 1957 in Punch. See cite below. Reborrowed from French prêt-à-porter (1951), itself a calque of English ready-to-wear.

More words from French, English

Full word history & related roots →
Cite this entry
APA

prêt-à-porter. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pr%C3%AAt-%C3%A0-porter

MLA

“prêt-à-porter.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pr%C3%AAt-%C3%A0-porter. Accessed November 5, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “prêt-à-porter,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pr%C3%AAt-%C3%A0-porter.

Source: prêt-à-porter on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.