[1]: 59 A small shop which sells expensive or designer clothing may be called a boutique.
A shop that sells clothes for a narrowly-restricted market such as school uniforms or outdoor sports may be called an outfitter.
It is not known when the first clothes shops were opened in Europe.
Some ready-made clothes may have been made in the sixteenth century.
[2] The number of clothes shops appears to have risen steadily long before the beginning of large-scale industrial manufacture of clothing in the second half of the nineteenth century.