Bookbinding

The first entry is la couture sur rubans, and the noun that opens it is one English borrowed and then put on a pedestal. In French la couture is plain sewing, the domestic kind: faire de la couture is to do some sewing, une machine à coudre is a sewing machine. The same noun names the result too, so la couture d’un pantalon is the seam down the leg, and one word covers what English divides between « sewing » and « seam ». Here it is the sewing that fastens the sections of a book to its tapes, and nothing about it is grand. English took the word for its clothes trade and kept only the top of it: « couture » means garments made to measure by a design house, is rarely said without « haute » in front of it, and gives « a couturier » for the designer. A phrase that in French belongs to a workroom arrives in English smelling of Paris. The idiom keeps the humble sense in view: examiner quelque chose sous toutes les coutures is to look at a thing from every side, seam by seam.